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Recently, Verizon went forward with its bid to purchase Yahoo at a now discounted price. Verizon is purchasing Yahoo mainly to gain more exposure in the digital advertising space. With both AOL and Yahoo under them, Verizon will control roughly 2% of the online advertising market, according to the Wall Street Journal. The acquisition will undoubtedly add to their top and bottom line, but what other value does Verizon see in Yahoo? The ultimate direction is to integrate Yahoo’s advertising technology into AOL’s business model and capitalize on Yahoo’s broad base of websites, but it is still unclear how two struggling internet businesses are better than one. Verizon so far has not seen to much progress in AOL since their purchase in 2015. Generally speaking, both sites appeal to an older demographic. This means that new user growth needs to accelerate just to maintain the user-base. Converting the younger audience to using Yahoo or AOL for any number of tasks will be extremely dif...

  A lot of Amazon’s crazy ideas get the most publicity. From warehouses in the sky to no checkout supermarkets, their innovations are often talked about to a great extent. One area that has not been covered as much recently is Amazon Basics; Amazon’s growing line of everyday consumer products. The line was initially launched in 2009, so it is not breaking news, but recently it has been evolving to a much more expansive product base and their platform gives them the unmatched ability to push their product on the consumer. When a person walks into Walmart and they are looking to buy a backpack, they will go to the shelves and peruse the various backpacks looking for a familiar name. Walmart’s generic backpack may be featured among them, perhaps having a favorable position to the isle, but generally the name brands that sell there do not want to be overpowered. Amazon does not have this problem. Through the nature of their website, Amazon knows immediately what you are look...

Johnson Controls seems unable to clearly define their business model. In October they released the car seat manufacturing segment of their business, making them less dependent on the cyclicality of the auto industry. The move made sense, given the fact that their other operating units revolve around increasing building efficiency and implementing security systems. It would seem that after their lackluster historical performance they are refocusing their business model. Johnson Controls also merged with Tyco in order to create cost synergies and add to top and bottom line. Johnson Controls does still operate their car battery segment, which is the largest manufacturer of car batteries in the world. Although automotive, it is less cyclical as demand comes from new and current car owners. All these changes have occurred in a relatively short period of time and following a period of poor company performance. This could serve as an inflection point for the strugg...

  Intercontinental Exchange, Inc (ICE) operates many of the worlds most well know stock exchanges including the NYSE. Intuitively, the majority of their revenue would come from transaction fees based on the volume of trades on their exchanges, however they have positioned themselves extraordinarily well to serve delivery data services to all different types of asset managers and traders. Data services, which in 2012 only made up 15.8%, now composes 33% of revenue and is their main source of growth. Their competitive advantage comes in the form of their ownership of exchanges.; a tough economic moat to overcome for the competition trying to provide similar data. Data is an ambiguous term, so what specifically are they able to provide? ·       Pricing and reference data ·       Exchange data ·       Analytics ·       Feeds  All helping investors make more informed...

Brookefield Property Partners (BPY) derives roughly 60% of its FFO from retail locations. Given the current retail environment, this area should be a cause for concern for investors. In its latest earnings call, BPY stated that their retail properties saw 5.3% same property revenue growth and a 20% increase in new lease prices when compared to expiring leases. The numbers sound promising, but could potentially be misleading. The 20% increase in new lease price is compared to expiring leases, but ‘expiring leases’ does not paint a very clear picture. It is possible that the leases expiring were long term leases with outdated conditions for lease adjustment, making the lessee’s payment well below market value. If the lease payments are increasing 20% from well below market value, it does not represent the explosive growth in retail that the measure would first lead you to believe, granted it is still positive for BPY, but not nearly to the same extent. While this scenario is unlikel...