Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Mid-Year Thoughts

The first 6 months of 2008 were a tough time for equity investors, financial firms, IPOs, SUVs, housing-related companies and Eliot Spitzer.

The S&P 500 is down 12.9% for the year.

I'm sure the folks at EBay are steaming as a French court yesterday ordered EBay to pay $61 million to LVMH for failing to block the sales of fake Louis Vuitton goods. EBay claims that they are already spending $20 million per year to combat counterfeit auctions. This is going in a very bad direction for EBay as there is really no solution. With millions of auctions going on they can't vet everything. If they are potentially on the hook for tens of million of dollars per brand/per country that they do business in they could really be behind the 8 ball.

Last night while I was asleep, Henry Blodget at SAI summed up the more recent goings on in the Yahoo fiasco. It's time for Yahoo to do something right.

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