24/7 Wall St. 2007 Price Target: Yahoo!, $20

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 8, 6:30AM EST

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Over the next week 24/7 Wall St. will set mid-year price targets (June, 30, 2007) for the sixty most widely traded stocks. These targets will be based on past price performance, industry activity, forward projections of financial performance, outside analyst opinions, and research conducted for doing past articles on these firms. The price targets assume flat markets over the next six months. In other words, if the Nasdaq moved up 25% between now and mid-year, the target share price targets would probably be too low. If the market moved down by 20%, they would probably be too high.

Yahoo! (YHOO). Yahoo! is in trouble, and there is little reason to see that ending. The big search portal is competing for an online advertising market that is not growing as quickly as it once did. Rivals Microsoft and AOL are working on resurrecting the growth and profitability of their own portals. Google has the majority of the search market. If the early success of Yahoo!’s new search engine ad program is not significant, investors would lose whatever faith they have left in the company.

Yahoo!’s stock is down over 30% in the last year, and it could drop another 30% in 2007.

Factors that may help Yahoo!’s price: Panama generates substantial revenue immediately after its release. CEO Terry Semel is replaced. Microsoft or Time Warner make a bid for the company.

Factors that could drop the stock below projection: Yahoo! could guide lower as it did in Q3 2006. Popular senior executive Sue Decker could leave for a CEO job elsewhere.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.