Yahoo Going Up

Yahoo Inc shares climbed to their highest level in a year and a half, as investor confidence seems to be increasing that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can orchestrate a comeback that eluded three of her predecessors.

The Internet pioneer has yet to actually provide Wall Street with any hard evidence that its business is turning a corner – and she has warned that it will be a lengthy job – but investor faith in the ex-Google executive is running high.

Hedge funds Tiger Global Management and Greenlight Capital Management recently disclosed large stakes in Yahoo, accumulated during the third quarter.

“Money managers are staring to want to own this name again,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners.

“For the amount of traffic they have, and the assets they have, they should be able to squeeze some value out of that,” Gillis said, referring to Yahoo. With Mayer at the helm, he said, Yahoo has “finally got somebody who the market believes can do that.”

Gravity Capital Management’s Adam Seessel said that Mayer’s recruitment of various Google Inc employees, including recently hired Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Henrique de Castro, has also helped burnish Yahoo’s image.

“What the market is seeing is not (financial) numbers so much as they’re seeing people voting with their feet, people moving from Google to Yahoo,” said Seessel, whose firm owns Yahoo shares.

“All these people from Google wouldn’t be following her if they didn’t think that she didn’t have some good cards to play,” he said.

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Will HP Temporarily Resurrects The TouchPad?

Hewlett Packard Co plans to produce “one last run” of TouchPads, days after declaring it will discontinue a line of tablets that failed to challenge Apple Inc’s domination of the booming market.

A day after the chief of HP’s personal devices division told Reuters the TouchPad might get a second lease on life, HP announced a temporary about-face on the gadget after being “pleasantly surprised” by the outsized demand generated by a weekend fire-sale.

HP slashed the price of its tablet to $99 from $399 and $499 the weekend after announcing the TouchPad’s demise on August 18, part of a raft of decisions intended to move HP away from the consumer and focus on enterprise clientele.

That ignited an online frenzy and long lines at retailers as bargain-hunters chased down a gadget that had been on store shelves just six weeks.

“The speed at which it disappeared from inventory has been stunning,” the company said. “We have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand.”

HP may lose money on every TouchPad in its final production run. According to IHS iSuppli’s preliminary estimates, the 32GB version carries a bill of materials of $318.

“We don’t know exactly when these units will be available or how many we’ll get, and we can’t promise we’ll have enough for everyone. We do know that it will be at least a few weeks before you can purchase,” HP said in a blogpost.

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