Opening Bell: 2.21.17
Uber Taps Eric Holder to Investigate Discrimination Claims (BBG)
“This is only part of the problem with this company -- I think quite often diversity and inclusion can be symptoms of a larger issue,” said Hutchinson, who co-founded Project Include, a group promoting diversity in Silicon Valley. “If we come out of this investigation and people aren’t fired, it’s going to say a lot about the strength of this investigation. Because what would it take for people to get fired?”
Dole Food Had Too Many Shares (Levine)
There was a class action on behalf of Dole shareholders, covering 36,793,758 shares, and after the court ruled in their favor, the class lawyers informed the shareholders and asked them to submit a form to claim their $2.74 a share. They got back claims from 4,662 shareholders for a total of 49,164,415 shares. "That figure substantially exceeded the 36,793,758 shares in the class," Delaware Vice Chancellor Travis Laster drily noted in an opinion Wednesday. Oops!
Here's why Snap is playing it safe with investors (BI)
"While on an absolute basis, the valuation appears high from an investor's risk/reward perspective, I think Snap becomes very much the next Instagram, or possibly bigger," an existing Snap investor, whose fund has a $150 million stake in the company, told Business Insider. Facebook has "consistently tried to kill Snapchat off," the investor added. "It's a risk, but what helps me sleep well at night is that Snap has consistently out-innovated Facebook for five years and I think that is likely to continue."
WhatsApp is The Latest App to Add Snapchat-Like Features (BBG)
Snapchat's way of sending photo and video messages "is a format that is being established and being changed and being improved upon by a lot of people in the space," said Randall Sarafa, a product manager for WhatsApp, in an interview. "We're bringing this format into WhatsApp and giving it a bit of the WhatsApp flavor that we know, which touches on reliability, security, and personal sharing."
Index trackers give Snap carte blanche on investor rights (FT)
This is a difficult time for democracy, and autocratic leaders are on the rise. I refer, of course, to shareholder democracy and to the increasingly bold attempts of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, when they go public, to prevent investors from having a say in the running of their company.
Wanted: a CEO willing to hold Greek banking's "poisoned chalice" (Reuters)
Greece has failed to find a boss for its Hellenic Financial Stability Fund since July, when its three-member executive team resigned. A new CEO, offered the job in late October quit a week later. His predecessor, an interim boss, had lasted two months. The fund, financed by euro zone and International Monetary Fund loans, has not explained its failure to find a new leader, but a source close to the recruitment process said the role was challenging and "less enticing than initially thought".
For Generation Z, ‘Live Chilling’ Replaces Hanging Out in Person (WSJ)
Teens have been hanging out online for 20 years, but in 2017 they’re doing it on group video chat apps, in a way that feels like the real thing, not just a poor substitute. Ranging in age from adolescents to their early 20s—the group loosely defined as “Generation Z”—these young people are leaving the apps open, in order to hang out casually with peers in a trend some call “live chilling.”
Goldman: 'Cognitive dissonance exists in the US stock market' (Yahoo)
“We are approaching the point of maximum optimism regarding policy initiatives,” Kostin said. “We expect investors will soon de-rate their expectations of potential 2017 EPS growth as they face the reality that the accretive impact from tax reform will not occur until 2018.”
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (New Yorker)
Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
Teens fall through frozen Central Park pond while taking selfies (NYP)
“They were breaking the ice,” she told The Post. “Some were like, ‘No it’s dangerous and [others] were like, ‘No, let’s [walk on the ice].’ So after that they all got on together and said, ‘Let’s take a selfie.’ But when they all went together, it broke and they all went down.”