NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
With trading volumes light and real news scarce, stocks can bounce around a good deal on the smallest bit of news. Consider the wild gyrations in Yahoo's stock this past week, inspired in large part by nothing more substantial than mild changes of hearts on the part of two Wall Street analysts.
On Monday, W.R. Hambrecht analyst Derek Brown, who has an actual "sell" rating on the stock, came out with a dire-sounding report suggesting that Yahoo's much-vaunted rollout of DSL service looked to be going more slowly than planned and that Yahoo's other businesses were at best "lackluster." Yahoo shares sank 7 percent.
With online ads still weak and Yahoo's HotJobs site likely to remain as weak as the job market itself, Brown argued that Yahoo's valuation looked "unjustifiably high and not at all reflective of the company's fundamentals or near-term prospects." The stock, after all, was then trading at 84 times his 2002 earnings estimate and 50 times his 2003 estimate.
He urged investors to "sell into strength," which many investors took to mean just plain "sell," strength or no. By Wednesday, Yahoo's stock price had slipped further, into the single digits.
Then on Thursday Yahoo soared some 12 percent after Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Baldauf upgraded the stock from a "sell" to a "neutral."
But Baldauf's analysis wasn't all that terribly different than Brown's -- he just figured the stock had fallen enough that it no longer deserved an actual "sell" rating.
Noting that Yahoo's growth prospects were still "clouded by weakness in the online advertising market," Baldauf made clear that his somewhat-less-negative stance on Yahoo was "based on valuation alone and does not reflect a revised assessment of fundamentals."
It's hard to tell how much of the buying frenzy on Thursday was inspired by Baldauf's upgrade and how much of it was inspired by the news that Yahoo was buying up $100 million of some $270 million of its stock that Japan's troubled Softbank was unloading.
But if there's a real bull case lurking anywhere in here it's hard for me to find.
Ay-yi-yi Village
IVillage likes to describe itself as the premier Web destination for "busy women sharing solutions and advice."
On Thursday, some iVillage users unwittingly found themselves sharing not advice but their private e-mails with one another. iVillage offers registered users free Web-based e-mail, and a glitch in the software enabled users to access the inboxes of other users -- while keeping them locked out of their own.
It was a situation that one upset user described, pretty accurately, as "completely bizarre" and "very bad." (Apparently, it takes an iVillage to read your e-mail -- to paraphrase Hillary Clinton.)
iVillage took its e-mail service offline early Thursday and it was still down midday Friday.
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The site also seems to be having trouble kicking the pop-up habit. About a month ago, iVillage announced it would be ridding itself of the scourge of pop-up ads -- those annoying little windows that spawn by themselves when you visit (or leave) innumerable Web sites (including this one).
Alas, the pop-ups are still there.
Granted, iVillage acknowledged in the fine print a month ago that a "small number of pop-up type placements may continue on the site but will be primarily tied to research and in-house subscription offerings and will be minimal in number."
But it does seem strange that the first thing new visitors to the site see when they get to this ostensibly pop-up-free zone is...a pop-up ad for iVillage itself.
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