In its roadshow presentation released online today, the Vegas-based company, which manages 42,000 hotel rooms, said one of the biggest opportunities it had going forward was on the Internet, including social games and real-money gaming.

Mitch Garber, the CEO of the company’s interactive division, said it recently launched Caesars Casino in beta on Facebook, making it the first time that a brand name was used to compete in the casino genre.

Garber believes that the game, which includes video slots, blackjack and roulette, will displace Double Down Casino as one of the category leaders. The developer of Double Down Casino, Double Down Interactive, was recently acquired by video poker giant International Game Technology for $500 million.

Garber said over the past 13 months, so much of the business has changed.

With the sale of Double Down, and the visibility into social games leader Zynga, which went public in December, and the release of more information this week by Facebook in its public filing, there are lots of verifiable signs that this is a big business.

For instance, on Wednesday, Facebook revealed that Zynga made up 12 percent of its overall revenues. Zynga’s Poker game is the leading casino-based game on Facebook, and more recently, it launched Bingo as part of a casino series.

Over the past two days, Zynga’s stock price has soared based on the Facebook news, rising 8.11 percent today alone to close at $13.39 a share.

Caesars said yesterday it was applying to be listed on the Nasdaq market under the symbol “CZR,” and that it was planning to sell 1.8 million shares between $8 and $10 apiece.

Caesars Chairman, CEO and President Gary Loveman was positive about a number of aspects of the business, as he should be in a presentation to potential investors, but one of the highlights was online gaming.

“This is a big deal for us,” he said, calling out the opportunity for gambling online, across both mobile and social networks and across multiple languages.

In addition to launching Caesars Casino on Facebook, the company has been building up its online gaming chops for some time.

Garber said this past year the company purchased Israel-based Playtika, which operates Slotomania, a very popular slots game on Facebook, iPhone and iPad. It also has two software partners that will enable it to expand into online gambling in the U.S. as soon as it becomes legal.

“We aren’t aware of any other bricks and mortar company that has the online experience that is preparing themselves as we are,” he said.

However, Zynga told All Things D it was currently seeking partnerships to pursue real-money gaming, and MGM Resorts also recently unveiled a plan to partner with online poker company Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment.

Of course, the big driver for everyone is that the laws are changing in the U.S., which makes it nearly a foregone conclusion that online gambling — at least some games — will become legal over the next year.

Late last year, the Department of Justice issued a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing bets on sporting events — not all events and contests.

With that clarification in place, it will now be up to every state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures.

“We see the odds being close to 100 percent,” Garber said. “It’s just a matter of whether it will be federally regulated or state by state. The states are already doing it, but the federal government is getting their act together, too.”

In a letter dated June 29, the SEC asked Groupon to clarify its accounting and informal remarks in its S-1 filing from June 2. The filing was amended multiple times before Groupon went public in November.

Back in June, the SEC found fault with Groupon extracting marketing costs from its income, saying it was “potentially misleading.”

The regulators also asked for a lot of schoolmarm-y tweaks. For instance, the SEC quotes Groupon’s statement, “Our customers and merchants are all we care about,” and asks the company to “Please balance the statements regarding the premise that your customers and merchants are all you care about with a discussion of your fiduciary duty to shareholders.”

Also made public this week were further SEC memos from this summer and fall that haggle over specific points.

Additionally, there are a couple of Groupon memos to the SEC regarding a crucial rally-the-troops internal email that was published here on AllThingsD.

Groupon argued with the SEC that Mason’s leaked email should not have been viewed as an offer to sell Groupon stock to investors, but rather “inadvertent dissemination to the public of the internal communication.” The company agreed to add the letter to its prospectus.

Here’s the first SEC letter from June, which gets into the meat of the regulators’ critique:

GRPN-20110630-UPLOAD-0

The company, which was officially spun out of Expedia yesterday, is trading down $1.24, or 4 percent, to $29.01 a share, under the ticker symbol TRIP.

Since Dec. 6, when Expedia shareholders approved the spinoff, the company had been trading temporarily under the symbol TRIPV.

While TripAdvisor’s stock price is lower today, it’s trading higher than Expedia’s, which was up 76 cents, or 2.8 percent, to only $27.61 a share.

The two companies picked a challenging time to conduct a split, with other recent IPOs, like Zynga, also struggling to trade higher. Kayak, a close competitor, has also decided to put its IPO plans on hold, however, that could change if the stocks perform well.

The breakup of Expedia and TripAdvisor creates two distinct companies.

Expedia, based in Bellevue, Wash., will be a travel agency focused on selling airline tickets and hotel and car rentals. TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Mass., will now serve as a travel-reviews site, operating in 27 countries and 19 languages. Without ties to Expedia, it can now solicit the highest referral fees from a number of travel agencies.

Much of the thought process behind the split has to do with what Expedia thinks its business is worth, compared to Wall Street’s valuation, and how much it will be valued on its own.

While Expedia’s travel agency business garners the most attention, it is TripAdvisor that has the bigger growth story.

Now that it is solo, it will be important to watch how its independent valuations evolve.

To celebrate the day, Stephen Kaufer, co-founder and chief executive officer of TripAdvisor, rang Nasdaq’s opening bell this morning — noticeably all by himself, without Expedia executives by his side.

Zynga has opened its stock-market debut at $11 a share, a small increase over its initial pricing from last night.

Late last night, the San Francisco social games company officially priced its shares at $10 apiece. It was hoping to sell up to 100 million shares at $8.50 to $10 apiece. At $10, Zynga was able to raise $1 billion in capital.

But investors aren’t going nuts for the stock. At one point this morning ZNGA shares were trading below their initial price at $9.50 a share.

That’s certainly not the kind of pop companies look for. On the bright side, perhaps the small (or non-existent) bump will make the company less likely to suffer the double-digit declines that recent Web IPOS like LinkedIn, Pandora, and Demand Media have all experienced this year.

At this price, the company is valued at $7.6 billion. That makes CEO Mark Pincus’s stake worth $1.2 billion.

According to sources close to the situation, neither CEO Mark Pincus nor one of its principal venture shareholders, Kleiner Perkins, will be selling any shares in its upcoming initial public offering.

While big investors often divest stock in IPOs, not all do. It is a carefully watched number by investors, who are always wary of insiders who unload a lot of shares in an offering.

But such activity by the fast-growing San Francisco online gaming company will be watched carefully since Pincus has recently been painted in a number of press reports as the greedy Mr. Potter of Silicon Valley.

Among the allegations is that he runs a poisonously tough culture that tracks its employees’ output and performance via elaborate data models that require extraordinary amounts of work, along with nefarious list-making of who’s naughty and who’s not.

That big-brother behavior has reportedly included taking away high-ranking jobs and the sweet stock options that go along with them from those execs found wanting.

While there is no doubt Pincus is a hard-charging personality, his defenders note that it’s due to a belief that life at Zynga is a meritocracy and that his practices are not any more heavy-handed than those at other firms.

Indeed, Pincus has a lot of competition in the tough-guy tech CEO category from longtime legends such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who set the gold standard for mean, as well as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and now Google CEO Larry Page.

Pincus does not even rate in this pantheon, which is more typical of tech companies than anyone would care to admit or, to be fair, care to care about. With big benefits, vast wealth and much latitude, many in tech don’t mind the grueling work schedules.

After all, it’s not exactly ditch-digging, now is it?

In any case, sources said the coverage has hit Zynga staff hard, as well as Pincus, who has not responded due to the IPO’s quiet period. That’s in contrast to Groupon, the daily-deals site whose own rough process was rife with highly negative stories about the company’s prospects.

While those media accounts were more aimed at the business itself and less personal, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason vociferously defended the company in a controversial letter that was then leaked and published (to me and by me!).

Pincus will doubtlessly have a lot to say to investors who ask about the company’s culture and its possible negative impact on attrition, as some stories have charged.

His decision not to sell, sources said, was inspired by Zynga investor and close friend Reid Hoffman, who has sold very little of the stock of LinkedIn, where he serves as chairman.

The action all begins next week, according to multiple reports, when Zynga takes its show on the road in preparation for an IPO that is expected to value the company at $15 to $20 billion and will take place before the new year.

It will debut under the ZNGA ticker on the Nasdaq market.

While some have been worried about Zynga’s future growth, its past performance has been a lot stronger than other Internet offerings. In the first nine months of the year, the company posted $828.9 million in revenue, double the amount from a year ago, with net income of $30.7 million.

Pincus’s holding onto shares will be seen as a plus, of course, although he has sold a large amount of stock in Zynga’s history.

According to its S-1 filing:

“From our inception in October 2007 to date, Mr. Pincus, our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Product Officer and the Chairman of our Board of Directors, has purchased an aggregate of 149,197,328 shares of our common stock. To date, Mr. Pincus has sold an aggregate of 43,629,310 shares of our common stock at prices ranging from $0.42 to $13.96.”

Pincus now holds 91.4 million of Class B shares, 16 percent of the total, as well as 20.5 million of Class C shares, 38 percent of that group. Kleiner holds 65.2 million shares, or 11.2 percent, of Class B shares.

Other big Zynga owners, who might or might not sell at the IPO, include Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures.

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Groupon plans to conduct its road show for investors next week, starting either on Monday or Tuesday.

While the decision to move forward could still change, it comes amid continued criticism of the Chicago-based daily deals company, which has had one of the rougher IPO processes for an Internet company in recent memory.

Just yesterday, the New York Times took aim at Groupon and its Wall Street bankers, retreading over the same list of issues, including controversial accounting, a too-large payout to its founders and issues around its marketing costs.

In addition, the social buying service has had some management turnover, with two COOs departing.

Lastly, it has amended its S-1 filing several times, for a variety of reasons, including an email to employees by its CEO Andrew Mason that struck regulatory agencies as a bit blabby.

That said, the initiation of the road show — where company execs will pitch its business to possible shareholders — might be an indication that Groupon’s results have improved in its recent quarter.

In the last quarter, the company lost $102.7 million on revenue of $878 million.

Also of concern is the stock market itself. Groupon, like several Web IPO candidates, had delayed its offering due to turbulent conditions.

Now, sources said, the company will go public on the Nasdaq exchange soon after the road show is complete and after pricing by its bankers.

That valuation will also be under scrutiny. Some had previously estimated that Groupon would have an IPO of up to $25 billion. Now it could be half that, sources said.

Well, we will presumably soon see, as Groupon plans to proceed.

U.S.-listed shares of China’s leading search engine, Baidu.com Inc., and Sina Corp., the operator of the country’s Twitter-like messaging service, plunged 16% and 18%, respectively, in the last two days of trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market even though these companies haven’t been accused of wrongdoing.

A series of alleged accounting frauds this year at little-known Chinese companies listed in the U.S. has triggered a sharp shift in sentiment among investors, who are now worried about hidden business risks or financial problems.

“If the whole sector’s sentiment is negative, then investors tend to be panicking, and then they sell the most liquid names, regardless of whether there are really any problems,” said Jeffries analyst Cynthia Meng. “We don’t think that the flagship [Chinese] Internet names have accounting issues.”

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Wall Street says otherwise: AOL shares are off more than 20 percent on a day when the market is perking up, just a tiny bit – the Nasdaq is currently up 1.64 percent.

What gives? AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told analysts today that he wasn’t happy with some of the company’s results. But earlier this morning, when I told him that investors were dumping the stock, he told me a sell-off against the broad market uptick would be “hard to comprehend.”

So here’s an explainer, via Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney. The analyst didn’t lower his “hold” rating on AOL after this morning’s earnings, but he didn’t see enough to make him happy, either. We’ll use him, via the note he published today, as a rough proxy for disaffected AOL investors:

• Revenue was more than Wall Street expected, but the bonus dollars came from AOL’s less profitable network business, not its core display business.
• Meanwhile, that display business actually got weaker this quarter: If you pretend that AOL owned TechCrunch and HuffingtonPost a year ago (i.e. “pro forma results”), then display ad sales would have increased 9 percent this quarter, down from 12 percent in Q1.
• Those display dollars may have been at risk even before we were facing Maybe Recession 2.0, or whatever we’re going to call it: The company “noted significant weakness in June & July.”
• Earnings are shrinking: “EBITDA declined over 60%+ Y/Y vs. downapprox 57% Y/Y in Q1; this marks one of the biggest declines we’ve seen in years.”
• And earnings will continue to shrink in the near-term: The company lowered its EBITDA guidance for the rest of the year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 632 points at 10,813, ending at the day’s low, in preliminary closing figures at 4 p.m. Eastern time.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index tumbled 78 points, or 6.5 percent, to 1123, with financial and energy stocks falling hardest. The Nasdaq Composite slumped 168 points, or 6.6 percent, to 2,364.

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Today’s stock market rout hit tech stocks hard, with most declining as much as the broader indices.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 4.3 percent and Nasdaq off 5.1 percent, shares of Google, Microsoft, AOL and Apple managed to stay in that range of losses.

Not so Yahoo and LinkedIn, whose shares were off 7.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.

LinkedIn, the business networking site which reported its second-quarter earnings today, saw its shares seesaw down and up and down and then up again today.

While its results were in line with Wall Street expectations, the company also created some worry after it said profit margins are going to be cut in half for the next quarter.

Still, after its huge fall earlier today, in after-hours trading, LinkedIn has recovered a bit and is now up five percent.

But Yahoo has continued its increasingly troubling stock drop after the markets closed. Its shares are now dipping below $12, which gives the Silicon Valley Internet giant a very low $15.6 billion valuation.

The company’s stock has dropped 34 percent in the past three months, as worries over a range of issues — from its Asian assets to its display advertising business to its talent drain — continue to be a drag.

The Dow slid 512.61 points, or 4.3%, to 11383.83, erasing all its gains for 2011. The slump of the past few weeks has driven the Dow down more than 10% from its May intraday highs, putting the index officially in correction territory.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 60.26 points, or 4.8%, to 1200.08, putting it in correction territory, having fallen more than 10% since May. The Nasdaq Composite slumped 136.68 points, or 5.1%, to 2556.39, also in the red for the year.

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Janrain, a Web identity management provider, has survived six years in the space and today is announcing $15.5 million in new funding led by Emergence Capital Partners and including Anthem Venture Partners, DFJ Frontier and RPM Ventures.

Janrain says it’s now used on 350,000 websites, including those made with Ning, KickApps and Get Satisfaction. You can see an example of how Janrain works on the Nasdaq community site below — basically, visitors are given the option to authenticate themselves with an existing account on another social service.

Web sites — that pay Janrain for its services — benefit because they can piggyback on the login and profile information users provide to other sites.

See also: Clearspring, which offers social sharing tools with an advertising business model, recently raised $20 million.

As someone who’s been a “quant” both in the Wall Street sense and in advertising, I admit there are parallels between Wall Street and Madison Avenue today, and advertisers should carefully consider how real-time bidding will impact their industry. But just because mathematical minds are invading the ad-trading industry doesn’t mean they’ll bring it down the same way Wall Street quants did.

My personal story as a Wall Street quant-turned-advertising exec sheds some light on the differences between Wall Street and Madison Avenue. My life as a quant started in the early 90s. I was working on my PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford and NASA, focusing on building the brains for autonomous, self-driving robots. Whenever I’d speculate on how my research would be useful in the real world, I’d think, “Well, someday we’ll send an autonomous robot to Mars.” Toiling in my lab for a pittance, I began to realize that applying my mathematical modeling skills to Wall Street might be more tangible — and lucrative — than dreaming about putting a robot on Mars. So in 1996 I became a Wall Street consultant — or, more colloquially, a quant. I passed on my mathematical knowledge to hedge fund financiers and traders so they could make more money.

Around the same time, I also consulted with packaged foods companies, helping them apply predictive data models to target the customers with mayonnaise and cereal coupons. In those days, the people applying quantitative approaches to advertising were most often called database marketers. They “mined” historical data on their customers and used it to target marketing campaigns, typically through direct mail and then as the years went by, through email and on their websites, and finally via paid search and banner ads.

Today, of course, marketers have adopted sophisticated, real-time bidding platforms to buy highly targeted “audiences” – buying display and video ads on the fly to reach in-market consumers right when they’re researching products or are ready to make a purchase. Enter the “real-time bidding” platforms for online ads that quants are supposedly hovering around, trying to find ways to “take wealth” from the trades.

Advertisers love real-time bidding because it turns display advertising into a precision science and a real-time market – cutting costs, improving campaign performance, and improving ad targeting. This is similar to how Wall Street trading works, but I don’t think quants will descend on real-time bidding platforms and try to sink the system for pure financial gain. Why? As I mentioned above, that’s just not possible from a technical standpoint. On a real-time exchange, as a user visits a page, an amazing technological triumph is happening behind the scenes. Your browser gets the page from the website’s server. Part of the page says “oh, you have to ask Google’s ADX exchange for an ad.” So your browser asks ADX for an ad. Then in real-time, ADX pokes a number of advertising companies’ servers to say “hey, right now I have this one little rectangle on this page for sale – how much would you bid on it?” As the servers evaluate whether to put an ad on this page, they can leverage information about the page, the user (anonymously), and other factors about the rectangle.

This is similar to the way a quantitative trading system might evaluate a real-time offer on NASDAQ to buy or sell a stock on a financial exchange, based on the stock’s p/e ratio, institutional holdings, and so forth. After ages pass from the computer’s perspective and the blink of an eye to us, the advertising company’s servers shoot back a bid to Google, saying “OK I want to pay $0.002472 for this rectangle and I want to show a peanut butter ad.” In the same way that NASDAQ clears trades, the ad exchange figures out the highest bidder and serves that bidder’s ad back to the person on the other end of the browser. Despite real-time “trading” of ads, there is no risk of quants turning online advertising into a shady money-making game. The opportunity to serve an ad (a single “impression” in ad speak) is conjured into existence when a person visits a Web page, and it is consumed the instant this person is matched with the right ad. There is no cigar-smoking man buying an impression at a low price and dumping it next week at a higher price on some unsuspecting naive buyer, simply because impressions just don’t live that long.

George John is CEO of Rocket Fuel Incorporated, a digital advertising company that delivers innovative and insanely effective online campaigns for large and growing brands.

In a move likely to ripple across the stock market, Nasdaq OMX plans to announce Tuesday a rare rebalancing of its Nasdaq-100 index, which will reduce the big weighting of Apple Inc. The company currently makes up more than 20 percent of the index.

The rebalancing was driven in part by the seemingly unstoppable rise in Apple shares, which are up more than fourfold in the past two years. The tech company’s big weighting means that a change in fortune for the maker of iPhones, iPods and iPads has a huge impact on one of the most heavily traded indexes in the market. After the rebalancing, which takes effect May 2, Apple will make up 12 percent of the Nasdaq-100.

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The exchange’s trading platform–the part of the system that executes trades–wasn’t compromised, these people said. However, it couldn’t be determined which other parts of Nasdaq’s computer network were accessed.

Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange.

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KickApps CEO Alex Blum will become KIT’s COO, and Blum and KIT CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman say almost all of the three acquired companies’ employees will hang on to their jobs.

Tuzman said his company paid about $62 million in KIT’s Nasdaq-traded stock for the three companies, and the balance in cash.

KickApps and Kyte had collectively raised some $55 million, so the companies’ backers aren’t going to do much more than break even in these deals. And the deal may be a coulda-shoulda for KickApps, which had talked to AOL about a $90 million deal three years ago, but never got it done.

Blum wouldn’t comment directly about the AOL non-deal, except to note that the spring of 2008 “was a different era.” And he says that all of his investors, which include North Atlantic Capital, Spark Capital and Softbank, have gotten “more than their money back,” and that all of them have taken KIT stock instead of cash. Spark general partner Santo Politi will join KIT’s board.

Tuzman, meanwhile, has an interesting story. During the first bubble he ran GovWorks, a failed start-up that happened to have a movie crew documenting its rise and fall. (Sadly, you can’t get “Startup.com” from Netflix or any other obvious place–can anyone point us to a copy?)

But this Forbes profile documents his efforts to build a second career. And at the very least, his newest company appears to be growing. In its last public filing, KIT reported quarterly losses of $8 million on sales of $28 million, which was up 151 percent from the previous year.

And late last year, KIT raised more than $100 million earmarked for acquisitions. None of that money, Tuzman says, was spent on these three deals.

[Image credit: Tyw7 via Wikipedia]

We’ll likely see a similar drop when it begins trading on the Nasdaq again tomorrow, though the company is expected to post another quarterly blowout when it reports earnings after market close. Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell suggests investors prepare themselves for a drop similar to the one Apple shares suffered after the announcement of Jobs’s first medical leave. “We’ve been here before at the start of 2009, so it’s probably going to be similar to that,” he told Reuters. “Operationally the company coped very well last time, but there’s a certain Jobs premium in the stock, and that will be the concern.”

And while that’s understandable, that concern is overblown. As I wrote back in January 2009, for investors to sell on news like this is just silly:

“Because if Jobs were to leave Apple–willingly or otherwise–people won’t suddenly stop buying Macs. The iPod won’t suddenly go the way of the Walkman and early adopters won’t suddenly lose interest in the next-gen iPhone. Nor will the Houdini-meets-Edison magic that Jobs has brought to Apple suddenly dissipate.

“Yes, Jobs’s sensibility pervades Apple’s culture and its products, but that culture and those products are not tethered to his health or day-to-day presence at the company. And Apple’s deep executive bench is more than capable of running it–and running it well–in his absence.

“iPhones worldwide will not stop working if something should happen to Steve–although apparently there are quite a few investors who believe this is indeed the case.

“Apple will endure–with or without Steve Jobs. There will be a post-Jobs era, and whether it begins this year or 20 years from now is of little consequence.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Apple Opposes Proposal on CEO Succession Planning
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

The software maker forecast first-quarter earnings of 54 cents to 59 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion to $1.05 billion. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect earnings of 51 cents on revenue of $992 million for the current quarter.

In after-hours trading on Monday, Adobe shares were up 4.5% to $30.48 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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Today, the execs at kaChing, a social investing site, are ringing the closing bell at the Nasdaq–actually, it is more of a button-pushing–to herald in a complete shift for the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up.

That includes a new name for the year-old company–it is now officially called Wealthfront–which signals a focus on linking professional money managers to customers and a move away from the “American Idol” investor talent discovery approach that kaChing had been founded on.

Now, Wealthfront is trying to solve the thorny problem of delivering good investment advice and actionable tools online.

Using a “methodology of the Ivy League endowments, to identify which money managers will outperform”–sounds fancy!–Wealthfront has vetted 25 investor options to be offered on its platform for anyone with a minimum of $10,000 to sink into equities (no bonds for now).

It’s certainly an interesting, if risky, move, for kaChing/Wealthfront, which has garnered $10.5 million in funding from a range of big Silicon Valley names, such as Marc Andreessen and OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan.

Thus, here is a video interview I did yesterday with CEO Andy Rachleff and founder Dan Carroll explaining it all:

And here is the official press release on the switcheroo:

KACHING BECOMES WEALTHFRONT, APPEAL OF PERFORMANCE ATTRACTS MORE THAN $100M TO INVESTING SITE IN FIRST YEAR

Wealthfront Introduces Manager Recommendations, Makes it Even Easier for
33 Million American Households to Invest Well

Palo Alto, Calif., October 20, 2010–One-year after launching its investing platform, the company known as kaChing formally announced today that it has changed its name to Wealthfront and unveiled a host of new product features as the company continues to deliver on its promise to make it easy to invest well. An SEC Registered Investment Advisor, Wealthfront also announced more than 25 registered money managers have qualified and joined Wealthfront, and that it has attracted more than $100 million in assets to its investing platform.

Average American investors, made up of 33 million American households with a net worth of between $100,000 and $1.5 million, have collectively invested $7 trillion in the stock market. Yet the average American with a net worth of less than $1.5 million has long been conditioned to believe it is impossible to outperform the market. A recent study, commissioned by Wealthfront and conducted by telephone by Harris Interactive confirmed this attitude, finding that only 6% of all U.S. adults, and only 3% of those with a financial advisor, “strongly agree” that financial advisors know how to consistently outperform the market. This finding is unsurprising since access to quality money managers has been traditionally limited to wealthy individuals with a net worth of at least $1.5 million who can afford the high minimum investment requirements.

“People have been conditioned to believe outstanding performance is impossible, but we think it IS possible,” said Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront. “Everyone deserves a better way to invest, and with our ability to vet, select and recommend outstanding money managers for investors, we believe Wealthfront can meet this need.”

Wealthfront Managers Outperformed the Market in Last Twelve Months

Wealthfront has built its business on the fundamental belief that it is not only possible to consistently outperform the market, but that it is also possible, using the methodology of the Ivy League endowments, to identify which money managers will outperform.

Since launching as an SEC registered investment advisor one year ago, Wealthfront has applied its rigorous vetting process, for which an average of only one in ten managers qualify, to add 25 top professional money managers to its investing platform and make them accessible to anyone with a minimum of $10,000 to invest. Together over the past year, Wealthfront’s managers have collectively outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 6% net of fees.

Today’s announcement, that Wealthfront has attracted more than $100 million in assets to its platform, further demonstrates the company’s appeal to both average investors looking for a better way to invest and to top professional money managers looking to scale their business through cost-effective distribution.

“With Wealthfront, we can easily and cost-effectively access a new segment of investors by taking on accounts well below our historic minimums,” said Colin Higgins, president of The Golub Group, an investment management firm with more than $600 million under management. “There’s no reason average investors with a net worth of less than $1 million shouldn’t have more options to invest their money. Now with Wealthfront–they do.”

Recommendations Make Finding the Best Money Managers for You Easy

According to the Harris Interactive survey, about one in two U.S. adults believe they know how to evaluate financial advisors. Responding to the need to make it easier for the average investor to invest well, Wealthfront also unveiled today its new recommendation engine to match investors with the most appropriate money managers for them. Taking an algorithmic approach, Wealthfront first vets managers to qualify for its platform. Investors then answer a few short questions about their investing goals, and Wealthfront recommends the best money managers to suit their goals.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/presto-chango-kaching-becomes-wealthfront/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101014/sirius-digging-out-of-its-hole/ http://allthingsd.com/20101014/sirius-digging-out-of-its-hole/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:01:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=50796
Another milestone for Sirius XM.

Shares in the satellite radio broadcaster hit a new 52-week high Wednesday–$1.44. And while that’s a fraction of their all-time high, it still means they’re up more than 130 percent for the year.

Which is damn impressive for a company that was slapped with a Nasdaq minimum-bid notice a little over a year ago.

And there’s more good news on the way. Sirius (SIRI) said Wednesday that it added more than 334,000 Net subscribers in its third quarter. That’s more than triple its gain of a year ago. Sirius now has about 19.9 million subscribers and hopes to end the year with approximately 20.1 million.

Amazing what a recovery in consumer spending and auto sales can do, isn’t it?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101014/sirius-digging-out-of-its-hole/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100810/intel-downgrade-hits-tech-sector/ http://allthingsd.com/20100810/intel-downgrade-hits-tech-sector/#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:07:53 +0000 David Benoit http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=28145 Technology stocks fell hard, as an apparent decline in demand for personal-computer components spurred fears of a sales knock to chip-making giant Intel Corp. (INTC) and its peers.
Several analysts said they had seen a dismal start to August for PC-related orders coupled with piling-up inventories of memory chips, a worrying sign for Intel and other chip makers that were coming off record quarters and had predicted the strength would continue.
In recent trade, Intel shares fell 4.2 percent to $19.79 as the stock, which tends to be a bellwether for the chip industry and for the technology sector as a whole, was downgraded by Baird analysts and had third-quarter estimates cut by both J.P. Morgan Chase and Wedbush analysts.
The Nasdaq Composite Index lagged behind the other major indexes as other technology stocks also stumbled. Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) dropped 6.1 percent to $6.97, Micron Technology Inc. fell 4.3 percent to $7.21 and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) lost 3.3 percent to $9.32. Storage chip maker LSI Corp. dropped 6.3 percent to $4.21 while disk-drive maker Seagate Technology Inc. fell 6.5 percent to $11.11.

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