Tom, I hear what you are saying.... I have very strong support at for CLRS @ 95-- the 50 dma and some at 100, iF we go down below that area and stay there I will worry.
with ARBA, we may take another look at the 50 dma @ 232 or
even a horizontal support area at 220
You ask if CMRC and vert are early and possibly leading another upleg. I don't know, but CMRC was the first of these stocks to top back on 12-28-99 after a parabolic rise.
It's swift decline, in early january presages the corrective
action, that hit the whole list of B2B players.
The scepticism is out there currently as I would surely hope:
--------
As James J. Cramer already has urged you, definitely read Jim Seymour's take on B2B, that great, er, phenomenon of new companies helping businesses conduct online commerce with other businesses.
First, I frankly didn't recall that Seymour accurately called the business-to-business, er, hullabaloo (I'm straining to avoid the words "craze," "fad" or "mania") back in March 1999. He was early, as good tech watchers are, by predicting that scads of initial public offerings would hit the market in 1999.
Last year was only the beginning of B2B, with a handful of first movers like VerticalNet (VERT:Nasdaq - news - boards), Ariba (ARBA:Nasdaq - news - boards), Commerce One (CMRC:Nasdaq - news - boards) and FreeMarkets (FMKT:Nasdaq - news - boards) going public. This year, obviously, is when the B2B floodgates are opening. And therein lies our difference of opinion, which actually is smaller than it appears.
Like Seymour, I think B2B is a major event. New companies facilitating the buying and selling of goods and services electronically is a revolutionary breakthrough. It's further proof that the Internet really does change (almost) everything.
My quibbles with the current environment are twofold. First, the great debate is who will capture the revenue, the new exchanges/software providers or the companies doing the buying and selling. My bet is that while the companies facilitating these marketplaces will do exceedingly well, the players they're aiming to represent will do everything possible to keep the value in their own camps. As that becomes more apparent, I'm guessing valuations will become more reasonable.
Second, the coming IPO glut in B2B companies -- or companies calling themselves B2Bs -- will end up sinking more than a few. Investment banks slowly rewrote the rules of sponsoring IPOs during the first wave of the Internet by pumping out far more deals than they'd ever considered before. Now, the entire food chain from entrepreneur to venture capitalist to investment bank to retail investor is ready to field as many new IPOs as possible. And so that's why we're seeing "verticals" like metals (MetalSite, eSteel, aluminum.com) producing more exchanges than can ever succeed.
Phenomenon? Yes. Sure thing? No. |
