Although I’m certified to trade securities for clients, I am no expert when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. Yahoo! stock received a major boost in price last trading day because of wild speculation that it was going to acquired by software juggernaut Microsoft. Microsoft and Yahoo! are in a fierce battle with Google for online advertising dollars. They are trailing miserably to Google so when you can’t beat them, join the competitor! Yahoo stock (ticker: YHOO) had an amazing trading volume of 245 million shares which is almost ten times the daily, average volume. At one point during the day, it almost reached its 52 week price high from all the day trades. Speaking of which, daytraders had a frenzied of business on Friday. I have never day-traded stocks but it must be an immense rush to buy and sell a stock within minutes and make a nice capital gains profit. Then again, you probably feel like killing yourself if you lose the farm in a matter of minutes as well. Although I read the headlines like everyone else on Friday, it didn’t make much sense to me because Microsoft and Yahoo! have too much similar and competing products for them to merge. The best scenario is for the both of them to work together in a joint partnership so they can weaken Google’s strangle-hold on the lucrative online advertising market.

Although Microsoft dwarfs Yahoo and Google, a small portion of the software giant’s business comes from the Internet.

Market value (5/3/07)	$296 billion	$38 billion	$147 billion
Employees	76,500	11,700	12,200
Fiscal 2006 Revenue	$44.28 billion	$6.43 billion	$10.6 billion
2006 Online Ad Revenue*	$2.29 billion	$4.56 billion	$7.3 billion
Headquarters	Redmond, Wash.	Sunnyvale, Calif.	Mountain View, Calif.
Year Founded	1975	1994	1998

*Reflects Microsoft’s MSN division and excludes marketing commissions for Yahoo and Google.

Source: WSJ.com research