Priceline.com Shares Rise But Growth Threat Remains Shares of Priceline.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: PCLN) rose 1.81% Tuesday as its competitor Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) posted a 24% increase in sales. Nevertheless, headwinds remain for both companies. As Kevin Shalvey noted at Investor’s Business Daily, Ascendiant Capital Markets senior research analyst Edward Woo has warned about the growth [...]

Netflix, Inc.  (NFLX), shares of which were up about 70% last week,  offers another interesting comparison of hedging with optimal puts to hedging with optimal collars. Here are the optimal puts, as of Friday’s close, for an investor looking to hedge 10,000 shares of NFLX against a greater-than-20% drop between now and June 21: As [...]

Mobile game maker Zynga, Inc. (ZNGA) offers an interesting comparison of hedging with optimal puts to hedging with optimal collars. Here are the optimal puts, as of Friday’s close, for an investor looking to hedge 10,000 shares of ZNGA against a greater-than-20% drop between now and June 21: As you can see in the screen [...]

In a recent post (“Two Ways of Hedging Apple and Research In Motion“), we mentioned that hedge fund manager and market technician Tim Knight’s bearish November post about Apple (“How Apple Became Japan“) looked prescient. It looks even more prescient now after Apple’s post-earnings tumble. In our post, we mentioned a few different hedges on [...]

Optimal Collar capability is live now — finally. Here are a couple of examples of it in action.

After a breakfast meeting with Fred Wilson and Arnold Waldstein on Wednesday, I handed Fred a copy of Neal Stephenson’s latest book, Reamde. Later Fred tweeted this, alluding to Stephenson’s knack for predicting the near future1 in his fiction: Gift from @dpinsen. As close to a crystal ball as there is in VC instagr.am/p/LQMiFAxNwp/ — [...]

In a previous post, we noted that we’d seen several examples of high optimal hedging costs presaging poor performance in a stock. This is the most recent example. Last week, we noted the high optimal hedging cost for Zynga could be a warning: Steep hedging cost for $ZNGA (compare to last tweet re $QQQ). A [...]