Featured On Yahoo Finance - The next multibillion-dollar opportunity for Amazon

There has been a lot of talk about Amazon’s ad-business lately, and for good reason. For Amazon, which can do with some margin expansion, the digital advertising space represents a big opportunity.

According to estimates, Amazon’s advertising business raked in $1.2 billion in revenue last year. While the number seems rather small compared to Amazon’s way bigger e-commerce and AWS segments, this segment is growing at a fast clip. Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak expects Amazon’s ad-revenue to grow to $7 billion by 2020. However, the opportunity could be even bigger. Exactly how big? Read the whole post on Yahoo Finance.

Comments

The RBI’s ‘operation twist’ – A sign of bigger measures to come, or a tweak to bandage the fiscal deficit?

If you’ve read financial dailies lately, it’s unlikely you’ve missed the term ’operation twist’, describing the RBI’s recent announcement that it will buy long-term Indian government bonds while selling short-term Indian government bonds through special open-market operations. A little trivia While the RBI didn’t officially come up with this name, the move reminded market observers of a similar policy move adopted by the US Fed back in 1961 (and later in 2011, under Fed Chair Ben Bernanke), dubbed ‘operation twist’, apparently inspired by American songwriter Chubby Checker’s popular number, ‘The twist’. In the context, it may be tempting to imagine RBI Chairman Shaktikanta Das grooving to yesteryear-actor Mehmood’s ‘Aoo twist karein’ from the 1960s, but this ‘twist’ isn’t probably quite as entertaining. What this is all about and the story so far On 19 December 2019, the RBI announced that it would conduct special open-market operations, buying long-term government sec...

Featured On Forbes - Why An Investment In Snap Is Fraught With Risks

Snap Inc's early days as a publicly listed company have been a mixed bag. If stock returns are the barometer of success, you'd have to say Snap's IPO has arguably been a success. The stock trades at just over $20.2 a share, implying a near 19% return for investors who bought into the IPO. Annualized, these returns look even better, given that Snap debuted on the NYSE just about three months ago, in early March. For most investors, these are returns you can't complain about. However, for those who bought shares of the company at levels closer to $30 a piece, the experience hasn't been as pleasant, with buyers at the peak now down by over 31%. And as things stand, the narrative doesn't look great for the company, even after such a big correction. To be fair, a big part of the correction took place prior to Snap's disappointing earnings release, and you could put that down to profit booking. However, poor quarterly results have played their part as well,...

A Garage Sale In The Indian Stock Market! Time To Go Shopping Yet?

Some of us (investors) have lost our pants, and some of us have lost our socks, but all of us have lost something this week, betting on stocks. Some stocks have fallen by 50-60%, maybe more, but even the best of the best have fallen a fair bit from their 12-month highs. So, is it time to go shopping yet? Everybody loves a discount sale... A little under a fortnight ago, this felt like one of those annual online shopping sales. Stocks were available at a discount to their 52 week highs, and while benchmark indices, the NSE Nifty 50 (Nifty) and S&P BSE Sensex (Sensex), hadn't corrected by all that much, several individual names were looking fairly attractive. Even the likes of HDFC and HDFC Bank were available at ~10% lower than they were earlier in the year -- an offer I'd grab almost any time of the year. Let's throw in some data here. Here's how things looked as on the 19th of September 2018. The broader market was even more battered, with the NSE Midca...

The Coin

Search This Blog