Retailing giant Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is scheduled to report 19Q3 earnings after the close on Oct. 24. The company known for industry disruption is expected to increase third quarter ad-revenue 71.7% from the prior year and to far outpace the 14.2% outlook for the S&P 500 media entertainment industry group. Analysts also anticipate that Amazon will outperform the S&P 500’s interactive media & services industry (19.5%), which consists of names such as Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O, GOOG.O), Facebook Inc (FB.O), and Twitter Inc (TWTR.N).

Tencent Music Entertainment and rival Spotify are now officially engaged in a duet, or maybe a duel. The Chinese streaming music service’s initial public offering valued it at the same $23 billion as its Swedish peer. Their business models are worlds apart, but from here on in they are likely to get much more alike. Having priced its shares at the bottom of its indicated range, Tencent Music did better than might have been expected given the recent whipsawing of tech stocks. The shares managed roughly a 10 percent pop on their Wednesday debut. The resulting valuation of around eight

Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts is swallowing his ego a second time. The controlling owner of the U.S. cable firm decided not to top rival Walt Disney’s $71 billion bid for some assets of Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox. He also backed down from an aggressive tilt at the Mouse House 14 years earlier. Given the eye-watering price Disney is paying, Roberts and his shareholders should come out the winners. Instead, Comcast will focus across the Atlantic and attempt to win a bidding fight with Fox for pay-TV outfit Sky, for which Roberts has so far bid around $34 billion.

A better filter Instagram could do worse than unfriend Facebook. The photo-sharing site may be worth more than 80 times what the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg paid six years ago. Now, though, the data leaks engulfing its corporate parent risk becoming a liability. Separating Instagram off – even if Facebook were to remain its biggest shareholder – might be a wise pre-emptive move. Facebook snapped up Instagram for $1 billion on April 9, 2012. The visual app was growing fast and attracting new users, but the price tag still looked like an example of inflated Silicon Valley valuations.

In the media business, it’s the headline that counts. So it’s little wonder Viacom rejected a takeover offer from CBS, according to Reuters, that looks at first glance like less than the market price. As it happens, Chief Executive Leslie Moonves can easily cough up more thanks to the potential cost savings, while leaving something for his own shareholders.The first thing to know is that the two companies are a natural pair. CBS, which owns its namesake national broadcast station and pay-TV network Showtime, and Viacom, home to MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, were formerly a single group. The

Sky investors on Tuesday received a mini Easter egg. Walt Disney is ready to buy the pay-TV group’s news channel to smooth the regulatory process for merger partner Twenty-First Century Fox. This signal of Disney’s commitment to owning the UK broadcaster boosts the odds of a bidding war with rival Comcast. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox has been stuck in regulatory limbo since late 2016, when the 39 percent shareholder in Sky launched an 11.7 billion pound ($16.5 billion) offer for the rest of the company. Britain’s antitrust regulator said in January the deal could give Murdoch undue influence given his existing

Mukesh Ambani is playing a new tune. India’s richest man, through his flagship conglomerate Reliance Industries, is merging two music-streaming services into one worth $1 billion. Reliance is following a well-trodden path of telecom operators dabbling in music, movies and other entertainment to attract subscribers. As his oil-to-retail giant starts to throw off cash, the tycoon could take his content ambitions to another level. Ambani’s upstart telecom operator has attracted 160 million subscribers in barely 18 months. Its super-fast network has more than half the combined data capacity of the top three players, well ahead of incumbents Bharti Airtel and Vodafone

Discovery’s cable deal rests on some rosy assumptions. The producer of “Shark Week” is buying Food Network and HGTV owner Scripps Networks Interactive for $14.6 billion. Cost savings won’t cover the premium and getting distributors to pony up for more content will be a hard sell in a churning media market. Like all deals that involve media mogul John Malone, who holds a voting stake in Discovery, this one is thorny. For starters, Discovery and Scripps have been mulling a merger for years. Any tie-up requires wooing the Scripps family, which holds more than 90 percent of the vote. Discovery

Often one hears the phrases “dumb” money and “smart” money when commentators are discussing financial market participants. Such classifications are not only arbitrary they are also meaningless. More than twenty years toiling away both on the sell-side and the buy-side side has taught us that asset markets are great levellers. There are countless instances where “smart” money suffers traumatic P&L underperformance (one prominent, and unquestionably smart, UK hedge fund manager has had a rather torrid time of it over the past 18 months) while “dumb” money has shined [1] [2]. Additionally, even those investors with proven strong investment track records

A historic week saw the Dow Jones Industrials Average (.DJI) close above 20K for the first time, President Trump’s first week in office, and a flood of fourth quarter earnings from 108 S&P 500 constituents.