You’ve got to hand it to Amazon.com. For bulls and bears alike, the stock keeps making as many sudden and unpredictable turns as a Harry Potter novel. And it inspires as much debate as a passionate screed from Al Gore or Christopher Hitchens.

Of course, the plot turns have been much more enjoyable for the bulls in recent weeks. After reporting its earnings for the first-quarter, traditionally a sleepy one for retail, the stock rallied 40% in two days. Amazon did in the quarter what few were expecting – it showed it was serious about pushing down margins that had been eroding for quarters.

Many observers, including myself, believed that surge was just a short squeeze that wouldn’t last long. We were wrong: The stock has pushed further to $73.31 last week, another 17% gain, largely on the back of its decision to sell DRM-free music tracks.

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There is a good deal of buzz in the tech-news world about a $3.9 million investment that Google has made in a company called 23andMe, a startup in hiring mode with dreams of “helping consumers understand and browse their genome”.

$3.9 million? What’s the big deal about a company that Google is investing less than 1/750th the cash is put out to buy DoubleClick? As Eric Schmidt has pointed out, Google buys companies with “1-2-3 people and you never, never hear about them.”

The big deal is this: Anne Wojcicki, who is a co-founder of 23andMe and who is also a shareholder and member of the board of directors, is married to Sergey Brin, Google’s President, Technology and one of its founders. Sergey also holds approximately 35% of Google’s Class B common stock.”

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I’ve been trying to find a way to illustrate just how screwy Microsoft’s $6 billion bid for aQuantive is, and here it is: For $6 billion in cash, Microsoft could have hired, in a single day, 60,000 engineers and salespeople (plus managers to make sure they earn their pay) – paying each one of them a $100,000 salary.

Of course, if Microsoft did that in one day everyone would think its executives had gone mad. After all, it already employs a modest 71,000 people around the world. Instead, it’s paying out $2.85 million for each of the 2,106 employees who work for aQuantive. Which, no matter how hard as people labor to rationalize this deal, is at the very least slightly more mad than that, if not good old-fashioned American bat-shit insanity.

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If you’re tired of the old cliché that information is power, here’s a new one: Disinformation is every bit as powerful.

That much we know from the mischievous email that was apparently sent out to Apple employees and that – naturally – quickly found its way into the tech-news cycle via the respected and highly trafficked tech site Engadget. The terse email said simply that the iPhone would be delayed to October from June and that the OS X Leopard operating software would not be released until January.

(Apple declined to offer any comment beyond reiterating that the email “wasn’t authentic” and that both the iPhone and Leopard are on track as previously announced.)

That was enough to cause Apple’s stock to tumble 5% from its morning high.

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We’re not even halfway through 2007 and I’m ready to make a nomination for worst IPO candidate of the year: Orbitz.

You may recall that Orbitz – the online travel site founded by five major airlines in 2000 – went public at $26 a share in 2003. It filed documents Thursday to go public again. But the Orbitz of 2007 is very different from the Orbitz of old.

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Hewlett-Packard caught Wall Street off guard by essentially giving a sneak preview into its second-quarter earnings 75 minutes before the markets opened. The announcement, the result of an errant email, caught a lot of attention. But just as interesting, I thought, was the way it all unfolded.

H-P was supposed to deliver its earnings a week from tomorrow, but an unnamed employee emailed financial information from the quarter to clients to an unnamed recipient. It must have been to someone who could easily have shared the info – a reporter, an analyst or a well-connected investor – because H-P hustled to release “guidance” before the markets formally opened.

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ANALYSIS (Q1 2007 Earnings Season): Internet companies are playing a game of stump the analysts. And they’re winning.

For the second straight quarter, the research desks on Wall Street have significantly and pretty consistently fallen short in their earnings estimates.

This is no small matter for analysts. Their job is to query the company, talk to its customers and crunch its numbers to distill it all into a single number: an EPS forecast that, if short by a penny or two is no big deal. But a forecast off by 23 cents, as happened with Apple this quarter – well, that can cost clients money. And clients hate to lose money.

Take a look at the graph below. With the exception of Yahoo – whose earnings were among the few tech giants to disappoint Wall Street this quarter – all of their net profits came in at least 9% ahead of the consensus of analyst estimates.

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