Teradata (TDC) is the market leading pure-play vendor of data warehousing hardware, software and services. The stock has been trading at depressed levels because of temporarily elevated sales & marketing expenses, a temporary foreign currency headwind, the broader market decline, and skepticism around the company’s ability to execute in a difficult IT spending environment. These concerns, while somewhat valid, are fleeting, and have created a compelling opportunity for significant capital appreciation over the next 24 months with meaningful downside protection. For 4.5x EBITDA, 7.0x P/E less cash and a 13-14%+ FCF yield you get an established market leader and major share repurchaser with a significant moat in a large, mature, consolidating technology market.

A brief look at the market

One of the most frustrating things about working as a private equity investor is being structurally committed to a “long-only” outlook. To be successful in any market, it is equally important to understand both the trends that will make you money and those that will lose you money. However, investors working in private equity – and most mutual funds – can only profit from the former. In my opinion, this is one of the larger challenges to the long-term success for each of these industries.

Restrictions on capital flexibility limit intelligent investors’ ability to generate profit (and preserve capital). For example, even if a great investor like Bill Miller had been prescient enough to foresee the entire financial crisis ahead of time, the best strategy he could implement would be to sell off his entire portfolio and move into cash equivalents. His returns would be market-beating, but they wouldn’t even exceed those of his checking account.

It finally happened. Yahoo (YHOO) has announced that Jerry Yang will be stepping down as CEO/Chief Value Destroyer of the company he created. Kara Swisher at All Things Digital first broke the news here.

The welcome news was met with a surge in YHOO’s stock price yesterday.  At last check, the stock was up more than 6.8% on the day, to $11.55.

While clearly not everyone appreciates the daily musings of Jim Cramer, it is hard to argue with his success as a media personality. One of his early vehicles, TheStreet.com (TSCM) has fallen into the abyss due to concerns about declining online advertising spend, mundane traffic growth, customer concentration and questionable product strategy. The stock currently trades at $3.62, down from $15.39 at the beginning of the year.

At this point, the company has a market capitalization of $113.7 million. Looking at the balance sheet, we can see that the company has $80.4 million in cash, $55 million of convertible preferred stock and no debt, implying an enterprise value of just $88.3 million. This is a company that generated $74.6 million in revenue and $15.9 million in EBITDA over the past 12 months while posting both top and bottom line growth (though margins did decrease).

On October 6, MetroPCS (PCS) pre-announced strong Q3 subscriber numbers. Here are the highlights:

Positives

Speaking with venture capitalists these days, it is interesting to hear them lamenting that their mandate often does not allow them to invest in undervalued technology businesses. One told me recently, “this is one of the few times in my career that public company valuations are below private company valuations in technology.”

And I would have to agree – there is blood on Wall Street, and many companies have come under irrational selling pressure in the technology space. This analysis will be Part 1 of a series on fire sales in public technology businesses.

The massive drop in stock prices due to concerns about the consumer spending environment and the broader economy has created some interesting long opportunities among companies that should be well-insulated from economic woes.

Dallas-based MetroPCS (PCS) is one of these. The company is a provider of unlimited wireless communications service for a flat-rate with no signed contract. MetroPCS owns or has access to licenses covering a population of approximately 149 million people in 14 of the top 25 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Orlando, Sarasota, Tampa, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. As of Q2 2008, the company had 4.6 million subscribers, up from 3.6 million in Q2 2007.

I’ll spare everyone a re-hashing of the various pros and cons associated with a long or short position in GeoEye (GEOY) – it has been extensively covered both here at Seeking Alpha and in many other places.

What everyone seems to agree on is this: the launch and successful provisioning of GeoEye-1 will have a monumental impact on both how lucrative and even how viable the business will be.

It isn’t exactly a secret that mobile devices such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry coupled with next-generation wireless services such as 3G and WiMAX are causing a fundamental shift in consumer, enterprise and carrier behavior. Consumption of voice, video and data services over mobile devices is increasing rapidly, and any good investor should be looking for creative ways to take advantage of this.

Unfortunately, the Apple and Research in Motion gravy trains have long since left the station, so investors interested in an alternative should look to the wireless communication tower operators, key beneficiaries who have yet to take off.