Matthew, I commend your remarks and advice; it's the difference between investing and speculating. With regard to those stocks related to Ascend please check out the story in Inter@ctive Week, as quoted in today's PR Newswire, excerpted below:
"New Index Reveals Which Internet Businesses Are Getting Rich Inter@active Week's Fast 50 Shows Top Businesses Sell Equipment and Software for Net's Infrastructure
GARDEN CITY, N.Y., June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- The top performing Internet companies are selling the equipment and software essential to the Net's infrastructure. According to the results of Inter@ctive Week's Fast 50, its newly created ranking of the fastest growing, most valuable publicly held companies in the interactive industry, the leaders are producing network access products, communications equipment, computer storage devices and data communications and networking software. "In the battle to build Internet-based businesses, it's the arms dealers who are getting rich first," is how the Inter@ctive Week senior writer, Steven Vonder Haar, puts it in his story introducing the Fast 50.
The Inter@ctive Week Fast 50 is designed to identify those companies in the interactive business which are growing rapidly and whose prospects for additional growth are valued most highly by investors.
To make the Inter@ctive Week Fast 50, a company must excel in four areas: revenue growth, indicating the ability to achieve momentum in the marketplace; operating income growth, showing the ability to create and grow the amount of profit generated by basic operations;
one-year total return to stockholders, the litmus test of how well owners are being rewarded for their investments in companies; and market capitalization, the benchmark that capsulizes investors' views of a company's prospects to perform well in the future.
The current winners in the Internet business boom are providing the building blocks for the Internet infrastructure. Inter@ctive Week's Fast 50 will be the yardstick to watch, having established a foundation for ranking of financial performance that reflects the unique characteristics of the interactive industry.
Of the top 20 companies listed in the Fast 50, 19 develop some piece of equipment or software that streamlines the way networks handle data traffic. The results are surprising: companies capitalizing on the Internet boom aren't the high-profile Internet players drawing
headlines for cutting the price of Net access, or rolling out new interactive services on the Web. At the top of the Fast 50 is Ascend Communications Inc. (Alameda, CA), maker of remote network access equipment for Internet service providers. Between 1994 and 1995,
Ascend quadrupled sales, while investors enjoyed a six-fold return on investments in the year that ended April 30."
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