Hilarious Carl Icahn-Jerry tussle

Hilarious account of Carl Icahn seeking Jerry's help in setting up his blog. Interesting quote from the above post:

On Wednesday Jerry dropped by my office, saying he was going to code my blog just like he coded Yahoo! in 1994: "By HTML in MS Notepad." He said the only downside would be I'd have to e-mail him every post, and it'd take him at least two hours to get it on the web. I said fine. The less time Jerry has to attempt to manage Yahoo!, the better it is for shareholder value.

Actually, the content is not far from reality - I am surprised why Yahoo doesn't have an established blogging platform yet. Here is the actual Carl Icahn's blog.

CDNS-MENT marriage good for LAVA

Today, Cadence (CDNS) went public with its' unsolicited offer to buy Mentor Graphics (MENT) for $16 a share valuing the 27 year old company at around $1.6 billion. Whether the acquisition would be good for CDNS/MENT shareholders is an issue to debate in a separate post, here's why I think this deal would be good for Magma Design (LAVA):

1. This further consolidates the already concentrated EDA market, which will help LAVA as it will be recognized as the third biggest EDA vendor.
2. Chip design companies already suffering because of low competition in the industry would be more inclined to keep LAVA in business - Would result in more business and dollars for LAVA.
3. It reduces competition for LAVA (and SNPS) in the Design Implementation space - MENT recently acquired Sierra Design to enter this market and if acquired by Cadence, the Sierra suite would overlap with Cadence's Design Implementation Platform, which would force the company to get rid of one of the tools, further benefiting LAVA.
4. Cadence does not have a very good history of integrating acquisitions - Going by its' history of past acquisitions, it may very well loose Mentor's strong foothold in the Physical Verification space, further benefiting Magma's suffering Mojave physical verification suite.


With the announcement, MENT is up over 23%, CDNS is down 6% and LAVA is up 6%.

Disclosure: Long LAVA

The height of inflation

Recently came across this restaurant bill in Zimbabwe. Seems pretty scary!
I am still wondering whether this was the agreed upon price at the time of ordering the meal or did the prices change over the course of the meal! (via bigpicture)