More on Yahoo

Carl Icahn is the "indirect beneficial owner" of a little more than 59 million shares of stock of Yahoo.

As I noted in yesterday's entry, citing his letter to the board, some of these are actual shares, some are "share-equivalents."

What that means, according to other recent SEC filings, is that Icahn owns about 10 million actual shares and more than 49 million call options.

Yahoo's annual meeting is set for early July. I don't believe a record date has been set yet, so he could presumably convert all of those call options into actual voting shares in time to use them at the meeting.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has given off equivocal signals about whether it has really "moved on" or whether it wants a deal with Yahoo still and, if the latter, what kind of deal it now wants. It doesn't want to acquire Yahoo anymore, but it wants a "collaboration," apparently having something to do with advertising and eyeballs.

MS hasn't made much progress lately in turning itself into an internet company. It remains wedded to the desktop model which (though comfortably profitable and likely to remain so for awhile yet) seems a bit like the wave of the past.

One amusing sidenote. A columnist in the Wall Street Journal recently suggested that what MS ought to do is split itself up. The specifics of the split-up he suggested sounded a lot like -- the trial judge's divestiture order of a few years back, one that MS appealed and freed themselves from.

Everything old is new again.

So where do things go from here? Wish I knew.

CME Buying Nymex

In an entry here four months ago, I asked Who Wants to Buy Nymex?

At that time, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was an unlikely candidate for that honor, because CME had just completed an acquisition of the long-time cross-town rival, the Chicago Board of Trade.

Now, though, the juices of digestion seem to have done their work, and CME is back at the table. Nymex is the new dish according to reports coming out. of the Futures Industry Association's annual meeting.

One new complication: the US Justice Department has in the meantime made some noise about how it would like to enhance the level of competition amongst exchanges.

But the antitrust division's focus isn't on horizontal issues (acquisition of one exchange by another) so much as it is on vertical issues (maintenance by an exchange of its own captive clearing corporation). It is of the opinion that if exchanges and clearing houses were separate, there'd be lots of new entrants, entrepreneurs would be starting up new exchanges faster than the older ones could merge with each other.

Or, in antitrust jargon, the vertical tie creates a barrier to entry.

Both the Nymex and the CME group have such a "captive exchange," which presumably will be merged as the mother corporations merge. If the merging parties have their druthers. Which may not be.

What I'm leading up to is a guess, or to be nicer to myself a speculation. The antitrust division MAY end up approving the merger of the exchanges only on the condition that they spin-off their clearing operation(s).

Just free-associating here ... members of the Democratic Party might see some hope for their own future in the very existence of CME/Nymex talks. After all, if two certain Senators -- one representing Illinois and one representing New York -- can kiss and make up, they'll have their dream ticket.

McCain simply represents the Justice Department merger review!