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Thomas J Lavan III

Editor's Choice

  • How the Individual Investor Can Cash in on IPOs

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

    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 | Editor's Choice

    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 | Editor's Choice

    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 »

  • IBM Finds Big Dollars in Big Data

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

    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 »