Black Friday

CRASH, BOOM,CRASH. That pretty much sums up the past few weeks on the world stock markets.

E-Bay Auction Worries

This could get interesting I had suspected E-Bay was having some trouble as they had what I considered a very aggressive advertising campaign in Canada for their website. It should be interesting to see what the future holds, though I suspect things will get worse before they get better in my opinion.
Let me know what you think.

eBay CEO Meg Whitman is reportedly pondering retirement as the online auction giant struggles with slowing growth. Makes you wonder about those fourth quarter results eh?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Whitman is seriously thinking about retirement after a decade at the helm. That’s a lifetime among Internet companies. For instance, Yahoo has been through three CEOs in the last decade. John Donahoe, who leads eBay’s auction unit, is the front runner to succeed Whitman.

What’s Whitman’s departure mean? Big changes are coming. A few hints of how big these changes are will come Wednesday when eBay reports its fourth quarter earnings. Analysts are expecting a profit of 41 cents a share in the December quarter with sales of $2.14 billion, according to Thomson Financial.

Going into the quarter, analysts expect eBay to cut its outlook for 2008 with a lot of management time spent on reviving listings growth. Listings growth in the U.S. is expected to be up roughly 3 percent in the U.S., according to Jeffries analyst Youssef Squali. However, Squali notes that eBay gets more than half of its revenue from overseas and a weak dollar can boost results. Overall, eBay is going to spend a lot of time talking about listing prices and potentially a major price adjustment.

eBay’s has two critical issues. First, Amazon’s third party partners are taking eBay market share. It’s unclear what eBay can do to boost listings revenue (it doesn’t have pricing power anymore). Most analysts expect eBay to cut insertion fees.

Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post writes:

EBay management has indicated that the company is looking at restructuring its listing fees structure in order to improve seller sentiment and increase listings activity (and better compete with Amazon for high volume sellers, in our view). Industry sources and our calculations indicate that sellers currently pay approximately 50-60% of their eBay fees upfront in insertion, gallery, and other option fees and only 40% in final value fees on goods that actually sell. For many sellers, particularly larger professional sellers, the lack certainty on their marketing cost of sales (because they can’t predict conversion rates) limits how much they are willing to commit to the eBay marketplace.

Simply put, it’s a good time for Whitman to hand off the reins–especially if impending changes at eBay will take a while to pay off.

The Stock Market,Spam and Your Money

The Stock Market,Spam and Your Money

I wanted to add a short editorial to this article, as though I found it interesting this is not new. This has been going on for a very long time. The thing that does surprise me though is that people are still falling victim to this old pump it and dump it scheme with stocks. I'm only left with the thought that it work's because there is no accounting for the greed of man.

Some other thoughts arise as well, as the writer points out in his Blog the securities commission has opened up the door for a new crime against company's and stockholders, where the people that now perform the pump and dump Email spam can now extort directly from the company. There is another question that comes to mind as well, it may not just be spammers that are doing this but some company's could also be very well doing it an angle that is not explored fully , in a way it's the ultimate inside trade.

One thing for sure though has me thinking as we have become a worldwide economy, with worldwide trading in stocks and commodities, who and what can possibly track all of it, if some company's or people want to commit these acts. So in the end the message is be careful where you put your money, and don't let greed rule your common sense.

How lucrative is pump-and-dump spam? by ZDNet's Ryan Naraine -- Are pump-and-dump spammers really making money from hyping penny stocks in e-mails? Paul Moriarty has the answer and it's an eyebrow-raising sight. Over the last month, Moriarty, director of product development for Internet Content Security at Trend Micro, has been running a virtual portfolio of selling short on stocks found during spam runs. After [...]