Yahoo was up almost 15% last week. I've been adding to my position and bought some more shares today.

Seems like there are a couple catalysts on the horizon:
- Yahoo could actually be sincere about trying to sell itself. Any sale would probably be for $40 a share, at least.
- Starboard could launch a proxy fight and potentially unseat the board. That would be difficult, but they did it before with Darden.

I dont get yahoo as an investment. Why not buy softbank? Same thesis but with value add mgmt

It's more of a short-term play - I wouldn't characterize it as an investment, per se. Basically, there are two potential catalysts that could lead to a short term spike IMO:

- Yahoo could be sincere in its desire to sell its core business, which would almost certainly be at a significant premium to its current valuation. There have been a number of rumors in that regard.
- If Yahoo is not serious, there's a good chance that Starboard would initiate a proxy fight. I don't know if they'd win, but if they did, they'd most likely get rid of the board and send MM packing, which would also lead to a spike in the share price.

I don't know if either of those two things would happen, but on the other hand, at the current market price it's worth the risk.

But, I don't know anything about Softbank, so maybe I'm missing something?

Agreed. AT&T is as safe as it gets. Love their acquisition of DirectTV. Their dividend history is fantastic and has a great yield for income investors. However, at ~$37, I feel its overvalued by ~10%. I'm looking add AT&T around $33 and Verizon (VZ) at around $42-45 range.

How do you feel about U-Verse?

Can a DTV + DSL package be able to compete with cable triple play?

Whats CapEx intensity going forward and how does it compare to CFO?

Glad I sold my WTW before earnings. Will probably look to buy back in after the dust settles.

Bought some icon, memp, and mar today.

well here you go, Coliseum buying more ACW recently:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d...45X03/doc4.xml

I think they had intended to do so beforehand to kick the stock price back over $1. Though guidance was pretty positive so it was going to go past $1 anyway on its own.

I'm actually tempted to get some of the ACW bonds now in view of management's focus to make it a non-issue.

Hey guys, I have a quick question about options...

I'm very bullish long-term on Fiat-Chrysler (FCAU) and bought up lots of stock and options late last year.

In January Fiat spun off Ferrari (RACE).

Before I purchased the options my quick research led me to believe that my options would be split into separate options to buy FCAU and RACE after the spin-off.

But looking at my account and the value of my options this doesn't seem to be the case, have I made a stupid mistake?

FYI I purchased Jan-17 FCAU $15 options at an average cost of $2.42 and they are down to around $0.60

Cheers

http://www.optionseducation.org/tool...kruptcies.html

Interesting article on oilprice.com re: offshore supply companies and offshore wind generation.

Hornbeck's management was pretty coy about why they were upgrading their MPSVs to 400 class, other than to say they saw potential business opportunities. Maybe they're planning on competing for the offshore wind market too? Pure speculation on my part, but a possible explanation. That might explain what amounted to a very significant capital expenditure at a time when their whole mantra has been to conserve cash as much as possible.

http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Ener...-Services.html

Done. A little less than 20% annualized. It takes away some of the pain of these stupid utility mergers

They decided to upgrade their fleet well before the **** hit the fan.

They announced they were spending a lot of money to upgrade and expand their previously ordered MPSVs in their Q4 press release.

$70 million increase in a $1,335 million build program that will also push out delivery. That is not "a lot of money" being added.

C'mon man, we're arguing over semantics here. $70 million is a lot of money when you consider it's a voluntary addition to their capital expenditure program, and they didn't have to spend it. $70 million represents ~20% of their current market cap at today's prices, and their stock price has rallied 50% in the last 5 days. If they used that same money on stock buybacks, they could've bought back a very large percentage of their outstanding float.

Given that apparently a lot of money is going to be spent on offshore wind construction (which I wasn't really aware of until I read that article), I'm just wondering if the two are related, which might explain why they would spend that kind of money.

Here's the relevant portion of the transcript:

Gregory Lewis - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker)

Todd or Jim, you mentioned the focus on liquidity. Clearly, cash is king in this market. So just going back to Robin's question regarding the upgrades of those four MPSVs. How difficult of a decision was it to increase the CapEx on those vessels? It seems like a potentially aggressive move just given the uncertainty in the market.

Todd M. Hornbeck - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, you're correct. That doesn't go lightly. Obviously, we see something that made us – push us in that decision tree. Those decisions, as you know, are not made [lightly] at all. And from the strategic nature of it, rather not go into what we see out in the future. It is positioning us for some opportunities and some work.

And the other flip side of the coin is delivering those vessels early into the market and just burning the cash from operations, you get there one way or the other. But that CapEx decision is not something that was just happenstance. We've been working on a specific strategic initiative for quite some time.

Their total enterprise value is over a billion - that is what you should be looking at instead of market cap.

Not that your idea is impossible, but I would think that you can't upgrade an oil service vessel to be an ideal windfarm service vessel. Might be worth you really digging into I guess.

I think as a metric for measuring the opportunity cost of their cash, market cap matters more in this case. If they were to repurchase shares, it would've been on the basis of their stock price, not their enterprise value. So, I think the metric would be ($70 million / Market Cap) = % of company they could buy back with their cash.

But yeah, I'm not sure how easily their MPSVs could be converted. My understanding is that MPSVs are intended to be heavy duty construction ships, so I would think they could be retrofitted. But I don't know. Maybe someone else will have some insight into this.

And again, I'm by no means definitively saying this is what they are doing. I'm just floating it as a possibility.

$70m is definitely a lot of money given their debt/cash situation. It might be the difference between dipping into a revolver or not if the downturn is prolonged.

Don't think it has anything to do with wind...they mentioned that the expansion will allow the ships to hold more chemicals. The answer made it sound like an entity may have pretty much requested this for a type of specialized work. I could be wrong on that.

Yeah, it's difficult to tell. You're right - they did mention something about chemicals in their conference call. On the other hand, in their Feb 2016 investor presentation, they said that the "Recent MPSV modifications include increased berthing, expanded cargo carrying capabilities and additional crane capacity" (page 45).

It's just weird to me that they would spend that kind of money when their whole mantra has been to conserve cash. But then again, if they were going to be burning cash from operations if they took delivery early, then a portion of that $70m is already a sunk cost, so maybe it still makes economic sense to do this upgrade even if it is just for specialty oil and gas work.

Their whole mantra has been to increase day rates to service the super deep water stuff. This is consistent with that.

Thanks to cost averaging, I am actually almost break even on ACW and HOS now. What a wild ride.

Khan Resources and Mongolian government settle for $70mm to be paid by May 15th. Last year they were supposed to have been awarded $80mm plus fees and interest so Im wondering if the $70mm figure is the net or just the award less fees/interest? Not sure what cut the third parties receive but assuming 10% of the $70mm it looks like a payout of ~75 cents to shareholders?

an idea i found interesting http://otcadventures.com/?p=1749