Yahoo!, Yahoo!, what did you do?
While I busy myself composing a nursery rhyme about Yahoo!'s deadly warning of an hour ago, I'm looking at the red numbers on my monitor. (What rhymes with "Project Panama"? Ooh, I can just rhyme with "unforeseen delay.") Yep, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is not looking good, down $3.57, or 12.3%, and flirting with its 52-week low of $24.91. Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) down 4%, or $16.54, to $398.15 (break on through to the other, other side!). eBay investors are slamming their portfolios, too, selling off eBay to the tune of a drop of 82 cents, or 3%, to $26.02.
Yahoo!'s position as bellwether certainly has a storied history; I remember oh-so-well those heady days in early 1999 when I sat in Jeremy Siegel's finance class at Wharton and watched Yahoo! soar to ever-dizzier-heights, rising and falling $100, $200 a share in a single day. It was crazy, and the company always lead the market. That was long before the advent of a public Google; and it's interesting to see how Google and Yahoo! are interacting now that the two of them share a sector on the NASDAQ.
Yahoo! is to blame, that's for sure. It's the company's failure to grab revenue from the ever-luscious but hard-to-handle local classifieds. It's the terrifically unreliable growth. More than anything, it's the "confusion and delay" caused by the unknown future of Project Panama.
It's all Yahoo!'s fault.
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