This Week's 5 Dumbest Stock Moves

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Companies do a lot of silly things. Let's go over a few things that could make them Darwin Award candidates.

1. You may already be a winner, loser
Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) thought it was curing an old problem by introducing new domains. With more than 260 million active accounts at Yahoo! Mail, the company introduced ymail.com and dusted off its old rocketmail.com, to give new email users a better chance at landing shorter email addresses.

The process didn't go smoothly. The Yahoo! Mail blog soon filled up with people who had problems with the buggy signup process. Poor Yahoo! can't seem to catch a break these days. Then again, the way executives keep leaving the company, maybe it should start offering its corporate "@yahoo-inc.com" domain to free email users, too.

2. If it's not broken, don't flix it
Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) upset some of its members this week, when it announced that it's doing away with Profiles, the feature with which a single account can have separate queues for different family members. All of the secondary queues will collapse into the primary accountholder's list of movies to rent. Profiles' movie ratings will vanish, a move that seems to go against the company's habit of wanting to grab as much personal user info as possible in an attempt to deliver the best DVD rental recommendations.

"Please know that the motivation is solely driven by keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible," the company artfully states. "Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website."

So Netflix is saying that it's killing the feature because its members are stupid? I'm not taunting -- I'm a subscriber myself.

3. An Apple a day
Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) got into the promotional spirit by slashing prices on Coldplay CDs as digital downloads. The move itself is sound, because Amazon needs to make some noise if it ever wants to close the digital gap between itself and the undisputed market leader.  

Why Coldplay, though? The band is already heavily associated with Amazon's rival iTunes Music Store. Does anyone remember the artist behind the billionth song downloaded on iTunes two years ago? Yep. It was Coldplay. What did Coldplay frontman and Gwyneth Paltrow name their daughter? Uh-huh. It was "Apple."

4. Be my little eBay
eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is in the middle of its three-day eBay Live event, in which site enthusiasts pay to mingle with company executives, share success stories, and wonder why Meg Whitman isn't around anymore.

The problem is that this isn't eBay's shining moment. The company upset many of its sellers with changes to its feedback ratings, PayPal requirements, and fee shifts. So why is anyone surprised that at least one blogger is pointing out that the number of attendees -- and exhibitors -- is down this year? I'm all for having eBay host an annual powwow, but it has wounds to heal first.

5. I guess that's why they call it a downgrade
Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Wienkes dramatically lowered his price targets on satellite-radio couple Sirius (Nasdaq: SIRI) and XM (Nasdaq: XMSR). He already had sell ratings on both companies, but are the new price targets -- $1.75 for Sirius and $6.50 for XM -- warranted?

As bad as each company's financials appear at the moment, the deal is apparently now just weeks away from getting the regulatory nod from the FCC. The new price targets would mean that the combined Sirius-XM would be worth less than either Sirius or XM as a standalone company before the deal was even announced. That's unreal.

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