Pandora Tries Something Old, Brings Back Founder $P

Disclaimer: I couldn’t give two shits about Pandora. I think it’s a crap music service and their “wide selection” of music isn’t as varied as they claim it to be. I hear the same garbage no matter how many stations and filters I add to it. I am actually jamming out to Spotify while I type this out because I’m not a punk.

About 20 minutes ago Pandora announced that they were bringing back their lord and savior Tim Westergren as CEO. Tim was their founder and lead their “Music Genome Project”. To my knowledge it’s just an algorithm that tracks what you listen to and gives you other crap that you might want to listen to.

A lot of companies think the best play to bring a company back to prosperity is to bring the founder on board, cause they are a “visionary”. That idea is working very well over at Twitter as you can see…I

Pandora’s ditch of income has been growing YoY and is soon to unearth over in China if they keep digging.

Pandora Media Inc., $P is already down nearly 8% in the first 10 minutes of trading.

I don’t think this change will matter. What innovation is going on over at Pandora? None that I can see. If anything a larger tech giant will scoop them up sooner or later and gut them like fish.

This morning Air Transport Services Group, $ATSG announced that they have reached an agreement with Amazon Fulfillment Services..(an ‘affiliate’ of Amazon..it’s Amazon dammit) to operate run an air cargo network for Amazon within the United States.

The commercial agreements will include the leasing of 20 Boeing 767 freighter aircraft to Amazon Fulfillment Services, Inc. by ATSG’s Cargo Aircraft Management (CAM), the operation of the aircraft by ATSG’s airlines, ABX Air and Air Transport International, and gateway and logistics services provided by ATSG’s LGSTX Services. The duration of the 20 leases will be five to seven years; the agreement covering operation of the aircraft will be for five years.

Aside from the operation agreements, Air Transport also agreed to allow Amazon warrants to acquire about 20% of ATSG’s common shares at $9.73/share over a five year period.

Pretty much Amazon will own ATSG in five years..it’ll happen.

Air Transport Services Group $ATSG is up nearly 24% today so far, while Amazon $AMZN is down almost 1.5% .. fun stuff.

Be sure to shoot me a follow on Twitter

Xerox, yea I know I forgot about them too, announced that they are splitting into two companies today.

A Document Technology company..or in layman’s terms..printers..worth $11B and a $7B Process Outsourcing company.

Carl had this to say on Twitter….(and Twitter of course makes no money off of it..putz).

Good for you Carl..good for you.

Xerox $XRX is trading up today around 5%.

Follow me on Twitter!

Martin Shkreli, yes him, threatened Ghostface Killah. Martin you must be out your damn mind!

Protect ya neck kid…

JetBlue Airways Corp. reported their Q4 earnings today before the opening ring-a-ding ding with earnings of $0.56/share which was a tad higher than analysts’ expectations of $0.51/share. JetBlue beat on revenue as well having earned $1.6B with expectations at $1.58B. Capacity is expected to rise somewhere between 14% and 16% in Q1 of 2016 and they are hoping for operating expense/seat mile to either be flat year-over-year or fall roughly 2%.

The stock however gives no shits, being down up to 6% today with the rest of the day left to punish it.

JetBlue joined all the other airways issuing refunds today. Customers who purchased tickets to areas affected by the Zika virus (which I heard only gives you the flu and has a more devastating impact if you are pregnant) will be refunded or be allowed to rebook their flights.

Southwest Airlines; $LUV is down up to 3.80%

United Continental Holdings; $UAL is also down up to 3.84%

American Airlines Group; $AAL is down up to 4.54% in today’s session.

Obviously I have no actual proof that people are selling eBay to buy PayPal, just play along with me here. Thanks.

eBay reported absolutely no revenue growth over the holiday. NONE! They had their assess handed to them by Amazon as well as a bunch of the other retail giants. Hard to compete with the likes of Target’s CYBER WEEK! The company reported revenue of $2.32B…flat on the year. Net Income fell from $0.82/share to $0.39/share…yea…. $EBAY is down as such as 9.60% in after hours trading. Fun stuff.

But hey on the bright side PayPal is kicking ass. PayPal $PYPL reported revenue growth of 15%, and 19% on an FX-neutral non-GAAP pro forma basis (foreign junk).

PayPal $PYPL is up as much as 5.25% in after hours trading.

For the full report and numbers and such for PayPal..go here.

Follow the Twitter!

Attorney General of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, sent a letter to Gilead CEO John Martin pretty much telling him to lower the prices of his drugs or they are going to hit them with the full force of the law in Massachusetts.

“I write to encourage you to reconsider Gilead’s pricing structure for Sovaldi and Harvoni … so that we may actually see this infectious disease eradicated in the United States in our lifetime,” she wrote, adding that her office will “continue to examine this potential claim for unfair commercial conduct.”

The two drugs, Sovaldi and Harvoni with are Hepatitis C medications are currently priced at $84k for a full course of Sovaldi and $94k for Harvoni. Because you know….capitalism.

Gilead is currently down up to 2%+ on the day.

Little late, cry about it. Boeing reported Q4 earnings today and the results are fairly mixed. On the earnings side, Boeing beat the street’s estimates of where they would be at this point.

I cannot stand when companies report non-GAAP numbers. Yea the number looks slightly better but you pulled the math out of your ass.

Boeing’s outlook for 2016 was meager and the street isn’t having it.

The company is anticipating its 2016 adjusted profit to land within a  range of $8.15 to $8.35/share on rev somewhere $93 billion and $95 billion. Analysts however are are looking else where..somewhere around the profit range of $9.41 per share on revenue of $97.26 billion. So yea….not great outlook champ.

Boeing $BA was down 9.50% + in today’s trading session.

Lockheed Martin $LMT is also down so far on the day as much as .40%

As The Fly posted a few hours earlier, Johnson Controls and Tyco International were in talks for a merger, and now it’s been confirmed.

Johnson Controls, $JCI and Tyco International, $TYC are creating a company with a combined market cap of $36B.

Johnson Controls shareholders will own 56% of the combined company, and receive a cash consideration of about $3.9 billion. The two will be combined under Tyco, but their name will be changed to Johnson Controls PLC.

$JCI is down 2.11% premarket while $TYC was up 5%

“We’ve performed really well over the last couple weeks because we are kind of a safe haven kind of stock,” he said, adding that Thursday’s losses are due to market sentiment and “those things tend to correct over a few days.” – Kelly King CEO of BB&T Corp. during interview with CNBC

Not sure what the hell they are talking about here. What safe haven? Performed “really well” over the last couple of weeks? Oh okay. OH OKAY.

This looks pretty safe to me. Thursday’s losses are due to sentiment and they’ll correct soon? Have you been saying that since the start of the month? BB&T reported earnings today and they missed earnings expectations but beat on revenue. They’ve been acquiring some smaller banks up and down the east coast including one close to home for me…I believe it was one of my first IBC posts…

Is this the same BB&T I am thinking about or am I completely wrong in what I am reading? #replytweet