Hortonworks (HDP) finally became public on Friday. It ended up being a success, up 45% at the time of this writing.
Coming into the IPO, underwriters cut the price and the amount to be raised, in order to make sure there was going to be sufficient demand. Mission accomplished!
The cloud company was created out of Yahoo! (YHOO), and Yahoo! still retains nearly a 17% stake. Is that why Yahoo! traded more strongly than the market all day Friday? It's hard to say.
The market has known about the Hortonworks IPO and Yahoo!'s stake for some time. However, sometimes it takes an event like the IPO itself to get the market's attention, and to force it to sit up. The additional strength that Yahoo saw on Friday could be due to this incremental $170 million worth of value (pre-tax) being assimilated into Yahoo's stock price. YHOO is outpacing Alibaba (BABA), too.
But the big news is going to come sometime in the next five weeks, when Yahoo announces what its tax plan will be to save money on its Alibaba stake, and possibly its Yahoo Japan stake.
At the moment, the market is still pricing in about a 25% tax rate in Yahoo's price. Isn't that high, given that Yahoo's CFO has telegraphed several times that they expect to pay very little in taxes? Sure, but the market never seems to give Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt. So, they'll believe it when they see it, and then they'll price it in.
I had wondered earlier in the day on Friday, whether the strength in Yahoo! had to do with possible news of a tax plan announcement leaking out on the coming Monday. It's very hard to know if that will happen.
At the last event in which he made public comments, Yahoo!'s CFO said the tax plan would come "at or before" the next earnings call scheduled for late January.
If Yahoo! were to do a tax announcement before the end of the year, it would seem to make sense next week, which is the last full work week before the holidays kick into high gear.
At the time of publication, Jackson is long YHOO and BABA.