To: Jimbo Cobb who wrote (2898 ) 7/12/1999 4:36:00 PM From: Kenya AA Respond to of 12662
Jimbo: It's about the NITE rumor M2 mentioned. I'll post the column that sparked all the Hoo-Ha first. K The Bets Are Made By James J. Cramer 7/9/99 2:59 PM ET I have to summon every ounce of energy to not take stock here. I keep wanting to lift Xilinx (XLNX:Nasdaq), having already taken 10,000 shares. I want to stop Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq) from going down by just standing there at 160. I want to put a floor in on International Paper (IP:NYSE) ahead of the quarter. Which means I do nothing. I have made my bets. It is a sleepy Friday. All I want to do is not force a trade out of boredom (IP) or desperation (Yahoo!). This is one of those days (and I'm reminiscing here) where I would turn to my wife in our Bucks County gardening shed of an office and say, "It looks really great. Looks like it wants to run." And she would look at me and tell me to go get us some Big Macs and fries to stay out of trouble: "Because if it looks great to you, it looks great to everybody, so forget about it. Tell me something I don't know." So, for the record, it looks great and I'm going for ices. Too old and too much exercise needed to work off a Big Mac at this point in my life. Random musings: Killing time with Jeff. We thought we could open up a Web site and start charging for rumors like AT&T (T:NYSE) to buy Lucent (LU:NYSE), or IBM (IBM:NYSE) to merge with Lexmark (LXK:NYSE), or DuPont (DD:NYSE) to buy Conoco (COC:NYSE). If those don't move you, how about Fannie (FNM:NYSE) to buy Freddie (FRE:NYSE), or Freddie and Sallie to marry? What the heck? All you have to do is say at the beginning, in small agate type, "The following is a total crock of &^@#." Value added. OK, here's one: Lots of puts being bought ahead of what may be a negative Barron's article about Knight/Trimark (NITE:Nasdaq). ______________________________________________________________________ The Dangerous World of the Chat Boards By James J. Cramer 7/12/99 9:06 AM ET Chat? I don't go there. Look, I am massively in favor of chat. In fact, I got the idea for TheStreet.com from the convivial discussions I used to go to in Motley Fool, which, when it started, I loved. Chat was where people coalesced to beat Wall Street. It was where you could cut through the hype and find out whether a company's technology really was any good. It was where you could swap ideas with an engineer from Ameritech (AIT:NYSE) or find out whether a chip company really had a revolutionary product. Now, chat is where I get my head ripped off. Last Friday, I mentioned that people were buying puts furiously on Knight/Trimark (NITE:Nasdaq). Their brokers told me that it was because of a possible negative article in Barron's. To me, this type of "journalism" has now become a staple for the Web. I don't like it, but it is what people seem to want. Next thing I know, I am being deluged by people telling me that the Knight/Trimark boards are going nuts with people cursing me. First of all, what do people know in the Knight/Trimark board that could be of value to begin with? Short of just cheerleading for Knight or bashing Knight, what do they know? Second, I cannot even begin to care about what people say about me on the Knight board or any other board, for that matter. I have been called everything from a liar to a crook to a saint to a communist. Heck, I'm just a guy and a dad. I am not a sinister plot against someone, and I am not attempting to make money off of an offhanded Knight/Trimark comment. I have no position in the name. I don't care whether the stock goes up or down. I have nothing on the line other than trying to be an honest reporter about what I see and hear. Finally, I feel so strongly that chat has taken a wrong turn that I have been one of the key people behind the scenes at TheStreet.com trying to come up with a way to have meaningful non-attack, no-cheerleading chat, the way that I remembered in the 1996 Motley Fool, which I loved. So far it has eluded us. But it is going to happen.