Adobe to buy Macromedia. I read the headlines yesterday, and found the news (as the owner of a small position in Adobe) exciting. When I first purchased Adobe, I compared them to Macromedia, their main competitor, and found them both to be solid companies. Over the last few years, they seem to have become slightly less competitive, as Adobe trounced them on the graphic design front, and Macromedia came to focus (as near as I figure, not having really followed the company) on developing Flash. Still, the merger makes a lot of sense to me, in that they still complement each other well, giving Adobe a chance to combine the best of both their programs (and set aside the legal bickering that has occured between the two), and expand into more areas that supplement their existing product line (the scuttlebutt is this merger is a move to capitalize on the foothold Flash has gained in the portable device market).

I still haven't really crunched any numbers or anything to determine if the price is reasonable, though at a quick glance nothing looks awry. When I first heard the news, my first response was, how much is the stock up on this? Instead, I find it was down almost 10%. I considered buying more, but relented, until I had time to look at the deal more closely. So, of course, it shoots up about 7% today. Which led to some nice "wisdom" out of wall street journalism. The 10% fall yesterday showed the market didn't like the merger (didn't see much word why--though I suspsect it's more a concern over "diworseification" rather than valuation), while today's 7% run-up suddenly represents a complete reversal, and now wall street loves the news. Just as if yesterday never happened. I own stock in a company that makes a treatment for blindness, so I guess I should applaude this myopia. I just wish I bought more stock in Adobe this morning, with the money I collected for selling Intuit (at virtually a wash...I believe I made a $14.00 profit, after holding it two years). I ended up investing in my old standby the eye drug company, QLT, Inc., which is down 20% since I bought back it (after realizing a nice profit selling it a year or so before). And as long as I'm rambling on about my stock investments, I should mention (I don't think I have before), I sold Atari at a 90% profit, after holding it less than six months. Too bad I didn't take my profits elsewhere, I've been taking a bit of a beating lately.