Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Now, Jerry Yang and co. look to be doing an about face.  Not sure if the stock plunge was the concrete wake up call for them in calling Microsoft back out onto the table.  But they're definitely doing a play to save face.

The market is also reacting funny.  Today, Yahoo's shares climbed back by $1.24 (not done yet), which either means that the saving face speeches are a way to keep the stock somewhat steady or that people are looking at Yahoo as a cheap buy.

Now, the best part is reading the commentaries from various message boards on what Yahoo's stock ought to be.  Well, last time I checked, this wasn't Wheel of Fortune.  Come on big money!  People seemingly randomly assigning value figures from an ethereal part of their body just is wrong to the real investor.  I bet these are the same people that cannot stop withdrawing cash at an ATM in a Las Vegas casino once they get on a losing streak.

Forget all this speculation on what the stock price ought to be.  You gotta go back to the fundamentals whether or not Microsoft buys Yahoo out.  Is Yahoo making a profit?  How much debt do they have?  What is the total market cap?  How is their revenue doing?

When you see reactionary, irrational actions in the market, you have to take a step back and look at the overall picture.  In Yahoo's case, the only thing is that they've just lost some traction to Google and Microsoft offered to partly bail them out in creating a large industrial monopoly.  That's reality.  You have to ask is the move the best option for the market?  People seem to only look at the current reality and hype, rather than digging deeper into the situation.  Reminds me of Spiderman where the Green Goblin tells him that people like to see heroes fall.  I guess he was right because Yahoo has always been good to most of us.  They've made some bad decisions, but haven't had enough of a chance to recover.  Things like this take time.

The other thing is that as I've been saying, a lot of people seem to have hidden agendas in all of this.  I think investors' have overt hidden agendas of simply trying to cash out as soon as possible, especially in this downtrodden market.  And I think the naysayers are simply bored and want something to keep them excited.  To me, neither really helps the overall situation.

Regardless, I think we need to re-assess the issue in 6 months.  It's too early to really tell if Yahoo's position is indeed weakened by not taking Microsoft's offer.  As part of the buy-and-hold type of philosophy, I'm someone who likes to wait and see how things turn out.  You can't just constantly react and speculate.  But you can use history to see whether or not you're repeating your mistakes.  We don't know if Yahoo's position was a mistake so I say sit back, relax and watch the show.