As the Internet economy has become an ever larger part of consumer transactions, the payments industry has slowly adapted to fill its needs. Today, with the Internet accounting for roughly 5% of US retail transactions, and with new technology poised
All else equal, employers ‘compete’ for employees with compensation packages of wage + benefits, the primary benefit typically being health coverage Logically, employers will seek to produce compensation packages of net wage and health coverage as efficiently as possible; and,
The success of the recent LinkedIn and Pandora offerings, the heady multiples for cloud services stocks like Open Table and Netflix, and the rumored valuations for innovators still private, like Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter, have prompted the media to
It has been just 4 years since the introduction of the iPhone. In that short time, Apple, joined in bitter competition by Google and its Android ecosystem, has laid waste to the traditional cell phone industry and with the popularity
We’re convinced MLRs remain stable through 2012 and potentially 2013, though we see significant risks of price competition in 2014. Consensus calls for rising MLRs into 2012 and 2013; we think this is premature, so we expect further outperformance from
Historically, bottom fishing has not been a successful strategy for tech investors. However, the extreme nature of the current market calls this truism into question. Today, nearly 20% of all technology companies with market cap of more than $3B trade
Dividing PFE as it stands (‘total-PFE’) into two or more entities, for example one having older off-patent products (‘established-PFE’) and one having newer products and R&D (‘core-PFE’), infers that such a division either makes core-PFE a growth company, or opens
1Q11 was an odd quarter for large cap TMT – growth in sales and earnings were well above historical norms, while the distribution of surprises was unusually poor. Against this, valuations remain near historic lows. Parsing out the quarterly results,
In our piece “Small Cap TMT: The Idiosyncratic Method”, we made a case that a thematic approach to sector investing was particularly effective for small cap stocks, vs. traditional value or growth styles. While stock selection based on association with
Plan sponsors’ (e.g. employers’) contracts with PBMs specify how much the sponsor pays for each prescription handled; plan sponsors’ payments to PBMs typically are determined as a function of the average wholesale price (AWP) of each prescription For brand drugs,
