Can Barry Diller Even Focus on Earnings? (IACA, LINTA)

On Wednesday morning, we’ll get to see earnings out of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI).  Frankly, this one has more questions than answers today.  We do not know if Barry Diller is going to be able to focus on results in the Q&A or if he is going to be discussing the Malone-Diller war as Liberty Media (NASDAQ: LINTA) CEO Malone has Barry Diller under fire.  It’s amazing what a difference a year can make, because he was listed as one of our own "most entrenched CEO’s" at the time and his fate is currently more than uncertain.

The estimates from First Call for the online and off-line media company are $0.55 EPS on $1.83 billion in revenues.  Estimates for next quarter are $0.36 EPS an $1.57 Billion in revenues and estimates for fiscal 2008 are $1.80 EPS on $6.82 billion in revenues.

Analysts have an average price target north of $33.00.  We are not really relying on options as a predicting tool because of the developments in the infighting that has come up and because of the pending break-up of the company. If we were looking at options as a tool today with static prices, we say options traders were expecting a price move of up to $1.00 to $1.25 in either direction.

This stock is up from its recent lows of $23.30 in January, but we’d take note that until this last bounce it has looked like one rolling low after another fake-out recovery.  The current prices are important as the 50-day moving average is $26.31; its 200-day moving average is $30.03.  Keep an eye on those as these numbers will likely change slightly by Wednesday.

Shares were just downgraded to Hold at Stifel Nicolaus on Monday morning over the current fate being questioned.  We actually have IAC/Interactive up for formal review right now for our own Special Situation letter, and once we have the revenue figures out of each unit we’ll be making a formal report for subscribers on this.

IAC/InterActiveCorp’s 52-week trading range is $23.30 to $40.99.

Jon C. Ogg
February 4, 2008