It's only Alibaba stock they hold that creates any "value" in Yahoo.

"The latter part of the business is clearly pulling the former along. Here’s how to think about it: Yahoo has a stock market value of $34.1 billion, and owns a 24 percent stake in Alibaba. Estimates for the current value of Alibaba, which is planning an IPO, range between $75 billion and $125 billion. If it comes in at the low end of that range, Yahoo’s stake would be worth $18 billion, or just over half of Yahoo’s total market value. At the high end, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba would be worth $30 billion—which would imply that the rest of Yahoo’s enterprise is worth as little as $4 billion, or 12 percent of its current value."

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-10-16/how-much-is-...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-yahoo-really-worthless-w...

http://qz.com/528986/charted-the-value-of-yahoos-alibaba-sta...

In fact they're not valued at zero. It's the Alibaba stake that is discounted, as all cash and assets on a balance sheet are by investors. That's trivially easy to prove by looking at Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Berkshire Hathaway, or Apple's financials.

If Yahoo were floated on the public market, with $4.8 billion in sales and $200 +/- million in profit, the valuation they would receive is not zero.

Proof? See: the valuation AOL had before being sold (not to mention what they got sold for). Yahoo is very obviously worth more than AOL was.

The bad analysis that Yahoo is worth less than zero, is caused by people that don't understand how you actually value corporations in reality. The bogus $0 valuation appraisal only exists in a fiction (and it makes for excellent clickbait), not in reality.

In reality, these are just are opinions you and I have. We'll find out in the next 18 months what the fate (and the value) of Yahoo is.

It's not an opinion that $4.8 billion in sales and one of the largest Web properties, is worth more than zero. That's easily backed up by comps such as AOL, Yahoo's nearly 20 years of being public along with how the markets treated it, and how they were valued prior to the Alibaba stake becoming valuable (hint: they never received a negative valuation, even in the absolute worst of times post dotcom bubble when their business was falling apart rapidly).

Fair value on stand-alone Yahoo is a lot closer to $5 to $10 billion than not. Verizon just paid $4.4 billion for AOL, which has a fraction of the business that Yahoo does.

I could claim that Microsoft being worth more than $1 is merely an opinion. Does that mean Microsoft's market value is subject to such whims? No, there's a vast historical basis to go on, and a well understood approach for valuing such companies and their businesses. The opinion of Microsoft being only worth $1 is wrong, and easily proven so. The same is true regarding Yahoo's core business being worthless, and for the same conceptual reasons. The only valid room for opinion in the matter, is in how much it's worth. Anything else has no historical example to back it up (there is not a single example in modern history of a public corporation of Yahoo's sales size, with a positive balance sheet and earnings, that isn't collapsing due to some scandal, that is worth less than zero; not one example exists).

Well you should buy some shares because Wall Street currently think Core Yahoo is worthless.

That's incorrect. Wall Street thinks the Alibaba stake, Yahoo Japan stake and its cash holdings are worth less than their face value - as is always the case (see: how EMC's VMWare stake has always been discounted historically). For numerous reasons, the most obvious of which is: investors can never realize the entire face value of those holdings, so they never give a $1 to $1 value to them.

We can simplify this really fast: give me one example of a public company of even remotely similar financials trading with a negative market cap in the last ~30 years in the US equity markets.

Tons always have. Look up the valuation of Macy's real estate; it is about 2x the market cap. Even adjusting for the full EV value its at a discount. They would realize more value by shutting down the retail business and selling off the real estate. But investors feel the chances of that happening are slim to none which leads to the low valuation. Yahoo is a tech company but revenue, growth rates, net income and free cash flow are common to all companies.

I realized that I'm not sure what Yahoo actually does these days. So I looked at their website, and...I still have no idea. Their homepage is set up like a sketchy news aggregator. Wikipedia says they do a list of things (mail, video sharing, online mapping...) that Google and others obviously completely dominate.

As a side effect, I'm recalling the days when Yahoo was a directory of websites, and getting nostalgic for the days when people actually had websites.

I still have an email account with them that I setup a long time ago. Use it to sign for various one-offs.

It's amazing how bad their email has become. Constant timeouts. Have to switch the "basic" mode to actually get email to load sometimes. The mobile version is barely alpha quality - the drafts workflow is horrible, it sometimes sends the same email multiple times. Issues with refresh. Shows stale emails. "Your login session has expired, you must log back in" errors even though a refresh makes it go away...

I mean it's bad. Really bad. Embarrassingly so. Like "how has someone not lost their job over this" bad. Or maybe they all did and now there's no-one left...

There has been a lot of down sizing and loss of mind-share at Yahoo over even the past 5 years...

They own stuff. Like Flickr and Tumblr.

Yahoo is just a holding company for Alibaba value. It's totally fucked up.

Yea, I'm surprised as well. What/how have they changed?

It is basically due to their ownership in Alibaba.