Portfolio management has become one big shell-game where funds are being moved around from sector to sector under the pretext of rebalancing. Today's theme seems to be "Find industries which appear to be immune to the Asian Flu". Hence the runup in Internet related stocks and pharmaceuticals. Nevermind valuation issues. William posted earlier (#5743) that YHOO had $6 mm in November revenues, while Excite had $4.8 mm. Are the market caps. in the same proportion? YHOO has conservatively 43.8 mm shares @ $63.5 = $2.78 billion, while XCIT has 16 mm shares @ $31.5 = $504 million. Go figure.
Along the line of what you wrote, check out Steve Harmon at isdex.yahoo.com. Today he writes,
We estimate total Netscape browser users at about 20 million. That's twice as many subscribers to AOL. On a daily basis MediaMetrix reports Netscape unique users in the 11 million range, making it number three on the Web behind Yahoo and Microsoft.
Yet Yahoo market cap is much higher than NSCP because there are no apparent bulldozers or steamrollers roaring in its path as in Microsoft vs. Netscape. We think Yahoo, Lycos and Excite's battles with Redmond are still to come, however, as Microsoft, which just acquired HotMail, already has WebTV, and buys into cable, keeps re-inventing itself as a content company. (Expect $1 billion investment in world's largest cable operator TCI any day now).
But the prevalent attitude is What, me worry? |
