Yankees Still Most Valuable Franchise in Baseball

Chuck Grom builds on his 20-year career as a results-oriented financial analyst with firms such as JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank in his current role as a managing director with Gordon Haskett Research Advisors in New York City. An avid fan of New York sports, Chuck Grom enjoys New York Yankees baseball.

Once again, Forbes has rated the New York Yankees as the most valuable Major League Baseball franchise, estimating the club’s net value at $3.7 billion. The valuation marks a nine percent growth from the prior year. The figures reflect a team that is still thriving financially, despite lackluster performance over recent seasons and a 10 percent decline in attendance since 2015. 

In an attempt to court younger fans and market the venue as a metropolitan destination as well as a sports park, the Yankees recently performed some light renovations to the stadium, taking out over 2,000 outfield seats to make room for patio bars. The team also took advantage of lower interest rates in 2016 by refinancing $1 billion of the bonds used to build the new stadium, improving its leverage in the process.

Apple Poised For Growth On Multiple Fronts

Chuck Grom is a longtime Wall Street analyst who engages with Gordon Haskett Research Advisors as managing director and covers a number of retail sectors. With a strong interest in market trends, Chuck Grom follows several major companies. Apple was recently in the news with speculation growing that the release of the iPhone 8 will coincide with a boost in earnings and stock price.

With the iPhone 8 set to incorporate high-end features, from augmented reality/3-D sensing technologies to a 5.8-inch OLED display, the per unit price is likely to rise from $749 and break the $1,000 barrier for the first time. This has led some analysts to predict a stock price rise from the $164 range to around $170 per share.

Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch also describe a significant upside for Apple in entering a number of new market areas, including health care and streaming TV, which encompasses the lucrative video game sector. Another area of potential growth for Apple is in autonomous cars, which Tesla has current dominance in. An added value feature of the Apple Car would be seamless integration into an expanded Siri system that is also likely to power a smart home assistant that competes with Google Home and Amazon Echo.