Best Buy (BBY 0.06%) can't catch a break.
The stock soared on Thursday on a newspaper report claiming that the company's insulted founder would be back by the end of the week with a fully financed buyout offer. Then the struggling retailer's stock went the other way on Friday, after Best Buy agreed to extend the deadline for an offer to the end of February. Investors don't like that, because it will probably give Richard Schulze a good reason to bid even less after what should be a crummy holiday quarter.
It's getting hard to see where this ends well for Best Buy. The board stalled Schulze when he had a higher offer in mind this summer, and now the fundamentals have crumbled to the point where either the company looks silly for taking a lower offer or passes and continues on its uninspiring downward trajectory.
Best Buy is a mess, and Mr. Market can be a real Ebenezer Scrooge this time of year when a company's on the naughty list.
Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.
- Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) moved higher on Friday after announcing that it had secured $2.12 billion in financing. The move will help the profitless telecom equipment giant to push out debt maturities a few years.
- Microsoft (MSFT 0.10%) is expanding its distribution of Surface tablets, but one analyst sharply downgraded his estimate of tablets that Microsoft will sell this quarter from 2 million to 700,000.
- Adobe Systems (ADBE +1.12%) posted better-than-expected results on Thursday. Never count out the desktop publishing software giant. Let's hope the results weren't Photoshopped.
