Billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s wife doubles his investment.

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Gingrich Super PAC Gets $5M More

China Investment Corporation, the sovereign wealth fund, buys an 8.68% stake in the holding company behind Thames Water.

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China buys stake in Thames Water

Mitt Romney ’s rivals this week intensified their attacks over business failures that happened on his watch at the investment firm Bain Capital. But even the successes touted by Romney’s campaign involved some painful decisions and layoffs. Read full article > >

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Mitt Romney, Bain Capital and the gospel of ‘creative destruction’

The private equity industry has come under scrutiny as Mitt Romney’s Republican rivals have attacked his record at the investment firm Bain Capital.

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As Romney Advances, Private Equity Becomes Part of the Debate

OMAHA, Neb. — Investor Warren Buffett says his company bought about $10.7 billion of IBM stock this year, giving it a stake of more than 5 percent in the technology company. Buffett revealed the investment during an interview on CNBC on Monday. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., planned to file a full quarterly update on its U.S. stock portfolio Monday afternoon. Read full article > >

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Buffett reveals new IBM stake, Berkshire Hathaway will file quarterly update on US stocks

NEW YORK — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. reported a third-quarter loss of $428 million Tuesday, only the second quarterly loss since the investment bank went public 12 years ago. Revenue from underwriting stocks and bonds plunged as businesses, unnerved by political wrangling in Washington and volatile markets, held off on new stock and bond offerings. Goldman also lost nearly $3 billion on investments in stocks, bonds and a stake in a Chinese bank. Read full article > >

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Rough markets slam Goldman Sachs; firm loses $428 million in third quarter

UK banks’ retail operations should be “ring-fenced” from their investment banking arms, the Independent Commission on Banking recommends.

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UK retail banks ‘need protecting’

On January 12, 2011, the investment world thrilled to the announcement that ITT Corporation, one of the top ten US military contractors, will disengage from its “defense” business as part of a planned split into three new companies. The move points to ITT as a possible canary in the coal mine for military contractors, and a signal to those of us who want to stop our current wars that the time is right to mount a divestment campaign on the war industry. read more

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Time to Divest From the War Machine; Drones First?

Clearly the investment bank did not anticipate the uproar that the sale of Facebook private shares would generate.

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DealBook: Why Did Goldman Blink?

Jeff — not his real name; he wanted to remain anonymous, for now — recently made waves when he purchased the domain name Sex.com for $13 million. TechCrunch nabbed an exclusive interview. Jeff has received a lot of offers, but he and his team are still deciding what they want to do now that they own one of the world’s most valuable web destinations: He’s hoping to do something more mainstream than online porn. The most surprising detail revealed in the interview is how much money the site is bringing in from placeholder advertisements even while Jeff sits around dreaming big dreams. According to Jeff, Sex.com brings in quite some money even now that it’s still parked. In fact, he claims the placeholder website receives more than 125,000 visitors on a daily basis, from all over the world (but mostly from the United States, India and Germany). The ad-littered parking page was set up as a placeholder while he figured out how best to develop the domain name, but the revenues he’s received from Sex.com already far exceed his expectations – he wouldn’t provide more details, but says the page is on track to return well into seven figures a year. That means that even if Jeff ends up never doing anything with it other than forwarding the domain name to a parked page, he could potentially still make $13 million from it by 2024, earning back his investment. Obviously, that’s not his goal. There are lots of opportunities to develop a domain name like Sex.com in my mind, adult businesses being an obvious choice. However, Jeff says he’s gotten a handful of interesting offers from mainstream media companies, technology companies and even one from the pharmaceutical industry so far. He hasn’t made up his mind on how to proceed with the commercialization of the domain name yet, but Jeff adds that he and his team have a deadline they’re working towards. Read the full story at TechCrunch .

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Owner of Sex.com Domain Discusses Future Plans for the Site

When the news broke last night that Facebook had raised $450 million from Goldman Sachs , arguably one of the world’s most powerful banks, my Twitter feed was clogged with notes of shock and awe. That investment, along with an additional $50 million coming from a Russian firm that already had a stake in Facebook, valued the social network at $50 billion. $50 billion?! That’s twice what Starbucks is worth and more than United, American, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines combined. (As of this writing, more than 65 percent of respondents to a Mashable poll said the valuation was too high.) But I don’t understand what everybody is so shocked about. Sure, this investment is reason to argue about the function that secondary trading markets do or do not serve and whether or not Goldman plans to sneak its way around Securities and Exchange Commission regulations that restrict shareholders of a private company to 500 or fewer individuals by arguing that an investment pool of well-to-do clients constitutes only one investor. But the valuation itself shouldn’t be that surprising for two reasons: Goldman is positioning itself, as it has in the past, to win the prestigious assignment of handling Facebook’s initial public offering when that day (inevitably) comes, perhaps even spurred by the Goldman investment itself in a bit of circuitous manuevering; and Facebook has been valued at $50 billion on the secondary market for months. While Facebook already boasts more than 500 million users (the service could be over 600 million by now and Lev Grossman, the senior writer for Time magazine that penned CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s profile for the Person of the Year issue, suspects it will reach one billion users by 2012  [video]), analysts anticipate it’s user base will continue to make significant gains as the international market opens up. The company is making, off of those users, a fraction of what Google and AOL make on each of their users, according to a piece in Fortune , but when you have one out of every 12 people in the world using your service, it doesn’t really matter how much you make off of each one as long as you’re making something. In addition, Facebook still hasn’t shifted its focus to monetization. Despite a continued laser-eyed approach to growth, the company managed to bring in $2 billion in revenue in 2010 , a significant amount more than than roughly $1.3 billion that eMarketer was predicting as recently as mid-August, and more than three times 2009 revenues of $665 million. Back then, before Facebook was making any money at all, investments from Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian firm that went in with Goldman Sachs, already valued the company at $10 billion. After Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser with an annual budget approaching $10 billion, expressed serious interest in Facebook , other large advertisers started watching the social network. And they should. It’s the easiest way — and getting easier every day as Zuckerberg and his team work to shift how we think about privacy in a digital age — to reach an incredibly specific group of individuals that is still large enough to warrant the investment of time. (In short, that’s the reason why TV Guide magazine is stumbling along with a CPM, the amount that advertisers pay per 1,000 impressions, estimated to be around $10 and other magazines are showing stronger performances. All advertisers know about TV Guide subscribers is that they watch TV. If they want, Procter & Gamble can target 30- to 35-year-old women from Memphis who are bold enough to list “Desperate Housewives” as their only interest.) Facebook will be able to monetize its enormous user base, probably “more efficiently in coming years as its business strategy shifts,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson told Andy Zaky for a Fortune story. No doubt, this is a company worth a serious chunk of change. And that’s something traders on the secondary market have known for some time. In November, TechCrunch reported that more than $40 million was spent on Facebook shares in a single weekend during a share auction held by SecondMarket , a New York- and Palo Alto-based broker-dealer that uses an online platform to facilitate the trading of illiquid, restricted investments. With 1.9 million shares bought and sold at an end price of $20.76 each out of an outstanding 2.5 billion shares, that weekend trade valued the company at about $50 billion. A couple of weeks later, Sharespost sold 165,000 shares at $25 each, valuing Facebook at $56 billion, according to Business Insider . It’s likely that we won’t know whether the traders on the secondary market overvalued or undervalued Facebook until the company starts selling shares to the public. Part of the Goldman Sachs deal requires that the investment bank bring in as much as 1.5 billion additional dollars from wealthy clients. The investment of these clients could move the SEC to force an IPO, but even if it doesn’t, analysts anticipate one by 2012. Then, the firm will hold a prime seat. A story in today’s New York Times reminds us of Goldman’s 1994 investment of $135 million in Ralph Lauren, which is now worth more than 16 times the $480 million valuation at the time. Goldman also oversaw eBay’s IPO and it now makes millions of dollars from fees that originate with the online auction site. It continues to manage then-CEO Meg Whitman’s fortune. The Facebook investment, $450 million, is only 1/2000th of Goldman’s $900 billion balance sheet. That isn’t a reckless investment by the company and it could be a small price to pay just to manage Mark Zuckerberg’s future fortune. Image: Goldman Sachs tower, saebaryo/Flickr.

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A $50 Billion Facebook Valuation Might Not Be So Crazy

It’s been reported that Facebook is on track to bring in $2 billion in revenue this year . And that’s a lot of money — obviously. But it’s nothing when compared to Google’s $25 billion, even though Facebook, with 550 million users and climbing, will overtake Google as the most trafficked website in the world (if it hasn’t already). So how does Facebook compete? David Pakman, a partner at Venrock Associates who focuses on early stage venture investing in digital media and Internet companies, argues on his blog that Facebook will increase revenues exponentially in the coming years by focusing on virtual good sales and by competing directly with Google’s AdSense program, through which partner sites receive a cut of revenues from Google-generated advertisements. Facebook payments, with Facebook getting 30% of all virtual good sales, will generate several billion dollars a year once it is ramped. This can become a $4B revenue line for Facebook within three years. But the other often underdiscussed opportunity is an off-site socially targeted ad network. We know from our investment in Media6Degrees that the most effective form of ad targeting after search is social targeting. These are ads that are targeted essentially at the friends of a brand’s existing customers. Your customer’s friends show extremely similar brand affinities as you…. The issue for Facebook is that applying this advanced form of targeting on their site would be uninteresting, owing to the lack of performance of advertising on social media. This is where Facebook Connect comes in. Already, more than 2M sites have implemented Facebook connect. I believe what Facebook will do is to offer to every one of those sites essentially an AdSense replacement. Pull out your AdSense ads and replace them with socially-targeted Facebook ads. When a friend of a brand’s existing customer appears on a publisher’s site, they can see ads for that brand. I believe these results will perform considerably better than AdSense’s contextual/semantic targeting and hence provide publishers with larger payouts than Google provides them. Facebook already has the large social data set to understand the connections necessary for this targeting. Of course, this will further encourage more sites to implement FB connect and Like buttons, since FB can make these requirements to be in the social targeting ad network. Read the full story at Pakman’s Blog: Disruption .

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How Facebook Reaches Revenue Targets: Take on Google’s AdSense Program

This has to be cold comfort for the thousands of people wronged by Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Court documents reveal that two months prior to Madoff’s arrest for fraud, JP Morgan Chase suspected the investment banker of wrongdoing, but the bank…

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JP Morgan Chase Suspected Madoff

Bernie Madoff’s victims, who were collectively swindled out of more than $50 billion, effectively recouped more than $2 million on Saturday in an auction of the investment titan-turned-villain’s personal items.

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Auction of Madoff stuff nets $2 million

Washington – Business groups spent record amounts during this year’s congressional elections, in support of mostly Republican candidates. Now, these groups hope their investment pays off on everything from lower corporate taxes to a resumption of free-trade agreements. “The results augur well,” said John Engler, the president of the influential National Association of Manufacturers. Engler is a former Republican governor of Michigan who could barely contain his glee Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. read more

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Big Business Might Not Get What It Paid for in Election