Negativity...
Sometimes great stocks go down for reasons of negative press coverage, I call it "buzz".
Maybe some of you remember AOL's slow death in late 1995 - early 1996, May if memory serves. The press and message boards just hounded AOL with talk of hinky accounting, huge debt, competition from Prodigy, "Internet is just a passing fad" per Bill Gates, etc. AOL price reached a low of $12. A Sunday NYT Magazine had a cover story about some fund manager who held a disproporitonate # of AOL shares in his mutual fund. The cover showed him brooding, in deep shadows. I thought "if this guy had a gun, he would shoot himself". That cover story marked the exact bottom of AOL. It snapped back to $22 within a few days and never looked back.
The same thing is happening to ATHM. The negative punditry is astounding. Some socialist City Council in Oregon demands that ATT give itself away for free to well heeled city residents who want high speed access to AOL for nothing (the poor need not apply, they after all don't have computers!). The press picks up on this and treat ATT like some monopolistic monster. And get this: The press treats Steve Case like some hero for its efforts to get this "free" access. What a friggin joke.
The moral of the story is this: Never get your investment advice from the mainstream press or even the mainstream business press. These are guys and gals who are (1) bitter and jealous and (2) have to have something to talk about. They do not perform in depth analysis of anything.
Postscript: Case has purchased TWX and will soon own the Roadrunner Service. Suddenly, Steve Case is saying he will "eventually" open up RR as a common access carrier. Gee Steve, when is that? What happened to Power to the People? No longer humming "The Internationale" or planning a May Day parade?
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