Yahoo Explores Retail Stock Trading, Sports Betting On Heels Of Taboola Deal

Yahoo, a portfolio company of private equity giant Apollo Global Management APO, has a retail trading business in the works.

Yahoo's new commerce and transaction business is expected to bolster its other core businesses — Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail, according to Axios, which cited an unnamed source in a Tuesday report. The company will also reportedly explore sports betting as an offering.

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This move would pit Yahoo against other companies in the retail stock trading space, including Robinhood Markets Inc. HOOD and Interactive Brokers Group Inc. IBKR.

Yahoo is also expected to eventually spin its core businesses off via a sale or initial public offering, Axios said. 

The news comes on the heels of Yahoo's acquisition of a 25% stake in clickbait company Taboola.com TBLA. As part of the deal, Taboola — a service that generates “promoted content” sections that appear on websites and blogs — will be the exclusive provider of Yahoo's native advertising.

Yahoo, under the helm of CEO Jim Lanzone, will also get a representative on Taboola's board of directors.

Yahoo reported $7.1 billion in full-year revenues in 2020 when it was owned by Verizon. Apollo purchased both Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion (about $2 billion in debt) in 2021. Apollo made up the difference by selling assets to SoftBank (for $1.6 billion) and Limelight Networks (for $300 million).

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