Thomas J Lavan III

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• Did Zynga Just Issue Splunk Investors a Stern Warning?

  By Thomas J Lavan III - July 27, 2012 | Tickers: FB, SPLK, ZNGA

  Last month I took considerable heat from readers on an article I wrote stressing the weakness of Zynga’s (NASDAQ: ZNGA) business. Admittedly so, my analysis was a very high level and academic one; I filtered the online and mobile game maker through Michael Porter’s 5 Forces Model. Assessing the core business story should be the first step an investor takes in deciding where to put his money. For more »

• Apple, Cable Companies, Cafeterias and...Coolio?

  By Thomas J Lavan III - July 24, 2012 | Tickers: AAPL, DTV, DISH, NFLX, VIA

  A little over a month ago the season finale of Mad Men ran an alarming ad that urged Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH) customers to call their provider and beg them to cut a deal with AMC to keep distributing their hit programming that includes Mad Men and the award winning Breaking Bad. The deal was not struck and AMC got dropped. On July 10th, a lengthy pricing dispute between DIRECTV more »

• How the Individual Investor Can Cash in on IPOs

  By Thomas J Lavan III - July 5, 2012 | Tickers: FB, GS, JPM, NES.DL, NOW |

  A calamitous June ended Friday with an exclamatory punctuation that saw all major American indices close up better than two and a half percent as Germany kind of sort of agreed to a bailout of its beleaguered EU colleagues. Stocks catapulted to the best June in 10 years even as German finance minister Schaeuble attempted to temper market enthusiasm by reinforcing Merkel’s “As long as I live there will more »

• Don't Get Zynged by Zynga

  By Thomas J Lavan III - June 11, 2012 | Tickers: FB, ZNGA |

  There’s a new scapegoat in town. His name: Mark Stanleydaq. Or is it Morgan Nasberg? Nas von Stanleyberg? OK so creating a celebrity dating name out of Morgan Stanley, Mark Zuckerberg and NASDAQ is harder than it looks.

  Assigning who’s most at fault is equally hard, so I won’t attempt to. Instead let’s take a look at what happened to one of (last time I promise more »

• Great Wolf Lodge or Sheep Shack?

  By Thomas J Lavan III - April 25, 2012 | Tickers: APO, FUN, WOLF, SIX |

  On Friday the peculiarly public bidding war for Great Wolf Resorts (NASDAQ: WOLF) between private equity powerhouses KSL Partners and Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO) came to an end. Apollo upped its bid to $7.85 a share, an increase of 57% over its initial bid of $5, and KSL walked away on Friday.  Deutsche Bank, serving as investment bank for Great Wolf, submitted a valuation analysis that priced the more »

• Splunk: The Google of Big Data

  By Thomas J Lavan III - April 23, 2012 | Tickers: IBM, ORCL, SPLK, TDC

  If you are anything like me, and I trust that you are given you are reading my article, you have been skeptical of all the pop and drop tech IPOs of late. I can assure you that Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) is not another brick in the crumbling wall of new companies to go public. Splunk’s IPO was expected to price in the $11-$13 per share range. Instead, it more »

• Lulu Voodoo

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 27, 2012 | Tickers: GPS, LULU, NKE, UA

  I am not good at yoga. I infrequently attended yoga class at my previous gym and the instructor would often pause a 30-person class, hold back her vomit and point out the errors in my mangy downward dog or wimpy warrior pose. My admiration for Lululemon Athletica (NASDAQ: LULU) has little to do with my enthusiasm or knack for yoga. Lulu released annual earnings last week that have the company more »

• IBM Finds Big Dollars in Big Data

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 27, 2012 | Tickers: HPQ, IBM, ORCL, TDC |

  IBM (NYSE: IBM) claims that so much data has been generated in recent history that 90% of all data ever captured was obtained in the past two years. That is an astonishing number when you consider the long history of the computer. ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was introduced in 1946. The Internet was commercialized in 1995. The massive amounts of data being captured and crunched today herald more »

• Sell Sprint? There's an App for That

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 27, 2012 | Tickers: AAPL, T, CLWR, S, VZ

  The worst weekly decline in US equities of the year probably signals an appropriate time to assess your positions. In late December I suggested that Sprint (NYSE: S) could be a viable buy opportunity. There were several factors at play that combined to paint a favorable picture for the beleaguered telecom. News that the AT&T T-Mobile merger had been canned by Congress paired with a massive iPhone bet that more »

• Greg Smith Goes Don Draper

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 15, 2012 | Tickers: GS

  Greg Smith used a New York Times op-ed piece to bow out in impressive fashion from his post as head of US equity derivatives in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS). Don Draper, AMC’s infamous ad man, used a Times op-ed to announce, “why he’s quitting tobacco.” His firm was heavily dependent on advertising dollars from cigarette companies and he knew that his more »

• Nike's New Fuel

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 14, 2012 | Tickers: NKE, UA

  In my previous post on Under Armour (NYSE: UA) I described how its moisture-wicking products were of higher quality and performance than Nike’s (NYSE: NKE). World class athletes Lionel Messi and Rafa Nadal publicly and embarrassingly complained that their Nike gear actually weighed them down over the course of competition due to sweat accumulation. But last year’s launch of the Nike+ GPS watch and its recent launch of more »

• Starbucks adds Verismo to Single Serve Offerings

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 14, 2012 | Tickers: GMCR, KRFT, SBUX

  Gauging the impact of Starbucks' Verismo entering the $8 billion a year single serve coffee market.

• Netflix: One of Wall Street's Fallen Starz

  By Thomas J Lavan III - March 8, 2012 | Tickers: AAPL, CMCSA, NFLX

  March 1^st, 2012, a day which will live in infamy…Okay it’s not that serious, but the date marks the first day that Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX)  subscribers are without 1,000 movies and dozens of shows offered as part of the long lived agreement Netflix struck with Starz. Reuters reported last night that Netflix has been in talks with cable companies about offering their streaming content as an more »

• Coach: Cart Before the Horse

  By Thomas J Lavan III - January 24, 2012 | Tickers: COH

  Luxury accessory and apparel company Coach (NYSE: COH) reported earnings this morning that beat street expectations again. This marks 3 straight quarters of net income increases and 4 straight quarters of surpassing Wall Street estimates. With these results, it is clear that Coach’s wagon filled to the brim with high-end fashion accessories is surging ahead of any sort of economic recovery.

  Management has effectively steered net income to gains more »

• The Pepsi Challenge

  By Thomas J Lavan III - January 24, 2012 | Tickers: PEP, YUM

  There’s no doubt about it: Ricky Gervais makes bad movies. Ranking high among his big screen flops, The Invention of Lying is a film about an alternate realm where everyone tells the blunt truth. In a rare moment of genuine comedy, Ricky Gervais passes a transit bus advertisement that states “Pepsi: When they don’t have Coke.” It is one of those “funny because its true moments,” but Pepsi more »

• Chipotle Asian Grill

  By Thomas J Lavan III - December 28, 2011 | Tickers: CMG, MCD, YUM

  Err…what?

  I live in Washington DC’s northwest corridor, not terribly far from the city’s culture center, DuPont Circle. The DuPont area is known primarily for two things. One, its massive rotary park that offers the neighborhood its namesake clustered with trees, scattered with park benches and punctuated by a picturesque fountain. And, two, the diverse cross section of people that call it home. Nestled in a cozy more »

• Sprint: Upgrade to Buy Over Night?

  By Thomas J Lavan III - December 21, 2011 | Tickers: AAPL, ATT, CLWR, F, S, VZ

  In October Sprint (NYSE: S) CEO Dan Hesse placed a $20 billion wager on Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone, agreeing to order over 30 million of the devices regardless of Sprint’s ability to sell them. At the time, the odds of this seemingly outlandish bet paying off were a shot in the dark. Monday’s news that AT&T (NYSE: ATT), underneath an onslaught of government opposition, would drop more »

• We Must Protect this Profit!

  By Thomas J Lavan III - December 18, 2011 | Tickers: ADDYY, COLM, NKE, UA

  Make no mistake about it. Kevin Plank is a meat stick. The founder and CEO of Under Armour (NYSE: UA) treats his business like a smash mouth football game among ACC rivals of old (he was a walk-on fullback for the Maryland Terrapins). The corporate headquarters outside of Baltimore have a sales scoreboard that looks like it was pulled from Friday Night Lights. They don’t have staff meetings, they more »

• The Call of Duty: Buy Activision Bizzard

  By Thomas J Lavan III - December 13, 2011 | Tickers: ATVI, EA, GME, MSFT

  In just 16 days Call of Duty’s most recent installment Modern Warfare 3 eclipsed $1 billion in revenue, beating James Cameron’s all-time box office record Avatar to the mark by 1 day. Activision Blizzard’s (NASDAQ: ATVI) Call of Duty franchise sets video gaming records annually with each refresh of the same winning formula and has helped video gaming move from a fringe market to a front and more »