savageinfidel

Let’s assume that you are a true baseball or soccer or basketball fan and you’ve just been appointed manager/coach of your favorite team. You are absolutely thrilled. Your goal is to win the world championship with your team. How exciting is that? How would you go about achieving this goal? My guess is that you would willingly spend hours analyzing every aspect of your team. You would try to think of how you could help each player reach their potential within the team to bring on the victories. You’d study everything about the game to help everyone do better. Heck, this might be so thrilling that you’d do all the work for free just for the opportunity. Is winning a few sporting events in basketball or baseball more important than helping your students to learn? Of course not – we may occasionally forget how important our jobs are but we should never lose sight of what we are accomplishing. I would argue that you already have a much more important job than any big l...

Facebook has agreed to a deal to buy the photo-sharing-application company Instagram for $1 billion. This is the social network’s largest ever acquisition in a move that many see as an attempt to bolster the company’s value before its impeding Initial Public Offering. This is a huge price tag to pay for a company previously valued at around $500 million that has very little revenue. The factor that may have caused Facebook to pay so much for Instagram is its rapid growth. Facebook decided that the best way to prevent a possible competitor from continuously growing in market share was to buy it out completely. Facebook also has wanted to make a push to increase its revenue stream from mobile site usage, which is rapidly outpacing the website’s growth. This is a huge departure from Facebook’s normal strategy of buying out small companies and signals a change in mindset for Facebook’s top executives. How will investors judge this move by the social media giant? In what is expected...

If 10 years ago someone asked you to join on with Facebook and become a partner, would you do it? Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate had the option but declined. Right now, everyone is trying to get a piece of Facebook once they become a public company valued at 10 billion dollars. What if in 1995 when the Internet was just getting started and someone asked you to join Amazon, would you do it? 17 years later, they are a multibillion dollar company posting record sales and growth. These two sites caught on to an early trend, the Internet. Back in the 90s, it used to be an exclusive privilege, one that those who had it found very frustrating. Not being able to use a household phone and the Internet at the same time was a common complaint, but also the speed of the network was unbearably slow. However, if you invested in Amazon when it was worth $1.50 a share and cashed in when it reached its high of 246.71, you could have potentially made a 16400% gain in a matter of approximately 15 years. ...

Bloomberg Assessment Test Information Session Date: Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 Time: 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm Location: Tisch LC-25 Join Finance Society and Bloomberg Institute this Tuesday and learn more about taking the Bloomberg Assessment Test (BAT). The BAT is a standardized exam for students to demonstrate a mastery of business-related concepts. The BAT also allows students the opportunity to gain exposure to global employers. Bloomberg Institute maintains an anonymous database of BAT performance and showcases these results to over 20,000 global employers. The BAT will be held on April 20 th . Steven Jon Kaplan: Contrarian Investing Date: Thursday, April 12th, 2012 Time: 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm Location: Tisch 200 Join the Finance Society this week as it welcomes Steven Jon Kaplan. The primary topic of his talk will be "Why Technical Analysis No Longer Works, and What to Do About It". He will describe the history of technical analysis, how most of its methods were...

Two weeks ago, we had the privilege of bringing in two of NYU's most reputable and successful professors. On Tuesday, Stern's very own Professor Aswath Damodaran talked to the Finance Society about the various components of corporate valuation, giving us a perspective on how to look at equity in the market. The notion of intrinsic value was particularly interesting. Often at Stern we talk about strategy and the benefits of mergers, and often we assign too much weight to intangible concepts such as 'synergy' and 'control.' Professor Damodaran warned us to be wary of these words when looking at the intrinsic value of a company, something that cannot be discounted. He also went into greater detail on many of the line items in a financial statement and how to look at them. On Thursday we invited in Professor Thomas Cooley to speak about some of his latest macro-economic research. Professor Cooley, the former dean of NYU Stern, began by looking at tr...

MEHYAR AFKARI Can Magic Johnson possibly justify the jaw-dropping price he's about to pay for the Los Angeles Dodgers? There's a price tag of $2.15 billion on the MLB franchise, which is two-and-a-half times more than what the Chicago Cubs sold for just a few years ago and over 50% more than the soccer giant Manchester United recently sold for. Guggenheim Baseball Management, an aggressive boutique group that includes former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson and longtime baseball executive Stan Kasten, placed a bid that is $700 million higher than the next highest bidder, Steven Cohen, the American hedge fund manager who founded SAC Capital Advisors. Where is $2.15 billion coming from? The former CEO of Bear Sterns, Alan Schwartz, is currently the executive chairman of the investment banking firm Guggenheim Partners. He says the firm and its clients, partners, and investors are a source for "a lot of the money for this purchase." It...

In the never-ending tragedy that is the Eurozone Crisis, Spain is now the next country to have the dubious honor of stepping into the world’s spotlight. As its ability to pay back its debts gets called into question, Spain is seeing its debt yields rise to almost 6% for a 10-year bond. In the past, countries have asked for a bailout at 7%. It is surprising to see the reaction from those in the media and around the world. Clearly after Greece, Portugal and Ireland, Spain was could not be too far behind? Just a quick look at Spain reveals an unemployment rate of over 20%. This figure stands at almost 40% for youth aged from 16-24. With unemployment benefits fit for kings and a younger work force that has remained almost perpetually unemployed for a few years now, who would work? Spain’s new government definitely has a lot of work to do. They have revealed a budget proposal that would utilize € 27bn in spending cuts and tax increases to counter the projected contraction in Spain’s GDP...