🍋 Yahoo Coming Back From Dead

Yahoo's looking at more creative ways to make money, especially as all signs point to a looming recession. The company also announced it may offer sports betting and retail trading soon.

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"When we fully attend to the management of self, excellent management of all else is unavoidable." — Dee Hock

Good Morning! It’s been a rough year at the gas pump, but oil has given up all of its 2022 gains and is back to pre-Ukraine war levels. The government now backs $1 million mortgages after inflation sent house prices soaring this year. The yield curve inversion, a significant recession indicator, hit new extremes this week. But most economists think a recession is inevitable, anyways. And yesterday was a wild day for AMC. The meme stock’s CEO announced her resignation after just three months and the company is planning large-scale layoffs.

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1. Story of the Day: Yahoo Coming Back From Dead

You might think Yahoo is washed up. The company was one of the most popular websites in the world in the early 2000s. But instead of dying a hero like Vine, the company has limped on.

Private equity giant, Apollo acquired the company last year from Verizon for $5 billion. It's already making money moves and finding creative ways for Yahoo to make money.

Yahoo is planning a retail trading platform within Yahoo Finance dubbed the "Bloomberg for retail trading." It's also planning to spice up Yahoo Mail and add sports betting to Yahoo Sports.

Yahoo also bought a 25% stake in an online advertising agency called Taboola.com this week. It's the classic private equity playbook of buying distressed assets at a time when online ad spending is drying up.

Yahoo has had quite the downfall. The company turned down Microsoft’s $45 billion buyout in 2008. And Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for just $1 million in 1997 and turned it down. But the company hasn’t totally fallen off... yet.

Takeaway: While other tech giants fight it out in the public limelight, Yahoo is making smart strategic decisions in private - disposing off non-core assets and investing in their most attractive ones. Yahoo, like Twitter, hasn't really innovated over the past few years... till now. While Apollo might not be giving us live updates on Yahoo's progress (like Elon is at Twitter), it's buyout of Yahoo might just be the best thing that has happened to Yahoo in the last 25 years.

2. Markets Rundown

If you want access to Wall Street insider interviews, industry deep-dives, and investment ideas, check out our Insiders newsletter.

Stocks closed lower as investors await Jay Powell's Wednesday press conference.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Bilibili ($BILI) +22% because the Chinese internet company grew its active user count 25% on the year.

  • (+) UPS ($UPS) +3% because revenue from holiday shopping shipments is expected to rise.

  • (–) Apple ($AAPL) -2% over concerns of China unrest, missing iPhone production forecast.

Private Dealmaking

  • HSBC will sell its Canadian unit to the Royal Bank of Canada for $10.1 billion

  • Escient Pharmaceuticals, a biotech startup focused on treating neurosensory disorders, raised $120 million 

  • Locus Robotics, a warehouse robotics developer, raised $117 million

  • Modern Milkman, a sustainable grocery delivery startup, raised $60 million

  • Bionaut Labs raised $43 million for drug delivery robots

  • QinetiQ US bought Avantus Federal, a Virginia-based defense contractor, for $590 million

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Top Reads

  • How personality tests infiltrated the world of work (Huck)

  • The exceptionalism of technology is probably over for the stock market (YF)

  • Gifts that cost nothing (Axios)

  • Elon Musk’s 6 rules for Tesla employees (YT)

  • How an aging population makes inflation worse (Axios)

  • Why it’s rituals, not routines, that win (Vox)

  • How zero-Covid protests in China impact companies like Apple (Axios)

  • Apple has no easy route out of China (WSJ)

  • Twitter’s CEO is now Twitter’s main character (Vox)

  • Leveraged ETFs can be a short-term home run or a long-term loaded gun (SA)

  • The fear of loss can cost investors big-time (CNBC)

  • SBF now only worth 100k; has lost 99% of his fortune (Axios)

4. Book of the Day: Kochland

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined.

Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities.

But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits.

He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter.

These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.

But there’s another side to this story.

If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

“He was also the father of four rowdy and brilliant boys, boys in whom he’d worked to instill the values that mattered most to him: intelligence, a hard work ethic, integrity, and drive.”

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6. Daily Visual: Sports Deal Surge

The number of sports industry deals, and the size of them, have been on a tear in recent years

Source: Bloomberg

Launch Your Next Income Stream at Contrarian Thinking

We talk a lot about money at Short Squeez. So we had to chat with Codie Sanchez at Contrarian Thinking who kind of obsesses on making it. They have a weekly newsletter sent to 200k+ on building up bank accounts.

We love how she highlights the WINS her readers are getting:

176 new businesses started (+ 100’s side hustles)

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7. Daily Acumen: Don't Rush

"Hurry, sure. We need to hurry.

Hurry puts it up on our priority list. Hurry gives us urgency and focus.

But rushing is something that leads to errors and then apologies. “I’m sorry, I rushed it,” is not something we want to hear.

But hurry."

Source: Seth's Blog

8. Crypto Corner

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9. Memes of the Day

 

 

 

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