Maven: The Source Is the MicroHoo Issue

You can read the New York Post story, which started the whole MicroHoo shebang, until the cows come home, and you won't get an understanding of who the anonymous sources are and what their motivations might be.

That gets me suspicious. If I had owned Yahoo!, which traded up heavily on the article, I would have taken my profits -- thanks to the source analysis. There does seem to have been some level of talks in the past, but they could have been perfunctory chats. Almost everyone "talks," especially these days. Did some banker or the other want to jump-start the process in getting to a more serious level?

Look at what happens in the real world or, I should say, in the business media's approximation of the real world. Right after the thinly sourced initial articles come down the pike, we get clatter and noise, much of it pointing, subliminally and not, toward a deal.

By Friday morning, Reuters, which earns The Business Press Maven's dreaded "Back of the Hand" award, ran with a one-source story on the deal, titled: "Microsoft eyeing deal to buy Yahoo -- reports."

Worse than just having one source -- something that is fine if the source is, say, Bill Gates -- is who the source is. Is he unnamed? No, worse. He is named and he is ... a risk-arb salesman from a B-list brokerage firm.