LinkedIn: Growth and Fundamentals Trump Valuation

This article was placed on behalf of the U.S. based equity research effort of institutional broker and investment bank Canaccord Genuity. It was part of a series of articles developed under an agreement with forbes.com to work with a variety of contributors and assist them in delivering actionable investment ideas each week. The site, forbes.com is one of the top 500 sites in the world with nearly 10 million subscribers and approximately 100 million page views a month.

Following his initiation on LinkedIn (LNKD) with a BUY rating and $85 price target, Canaccord Genuity Internet tech analyst Michael Graham said “Earnings per share growth will be strong in 2012 and accelerate in 2013.”

“We believe LinkedIn is the default network for professionals, and believe most users desire to keep professional profiles separate from their personal ones, creating barriers to competition.”

He added, “LinkedIn has considerable operating momentum; we expect continued strong growth domestically and even faster growth internationally, where we believe the business is just entering an acceleration phase in penetration rates. . . While 2012 is expected to see high marketing spend, we believe 2013 should begin to show operating leverage, and we expect earnings growth to accelerate.”

Amazon Summits A Dow That No Longer Exists

The addition of Amazon to the Dow with Walgreen’s unceremonious deletion, and the Dow’s current composition tells it like it

Financial Institutions Feeling the Crunch in Countdown to CECL Implementation

I was retained by Big Four accounting and consulting firm KPMG to assist them in their thought leadership efforts centered on changing accounting regulations. In this case, the Financial Accounting Standards Board or FASB had instituted new rules on the measurement of current and expected credit losses, i.e. CECL, that would require massive reorganization of financial reporting for the largest financial services organizations in the world. This thought leadership piece concerned the results of a survey among C-suite executives about their state of preparedness in the final countdown to the CECL implementation.

Securitizing Structured Settlement Payment Streams: A Primer

Fall 2012. This article was written with Stefano Sola and Phil Donahue, executives at JGWPT Holdings. We were engaged by JGWPT to assist them
in publishing the article below for The Journal Of Structured Finance.

Is The Media Biased?

This story is from our February 2024 update newsletter that offers communications insights, and hopefully, some amusing diversion.

David R. Evanson, LLC