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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Wells who wrote (68633)	7/21/1999 6:35:00 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 164684

Eric -- well said.

To: Eric Wells who wrote (68633)	7/21/1999 6:53:00 PM
From: Jeff Dryer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Eric, That is a very thought provoking post. Well said. >4. Bezo's also states: "And looking at the first few days of sales in >our new toys and electronics stores, we're shocked and grateful. In >fact, we believe we're already the #1 seller of children's products >online." I view this as a rather weak statement. In short, where's >the data? I cannot imagine Microsoft coming out and saying "We think >we are the #1 seller of spreadsheets," without having any data to >back it up. I'm with you. Hype statements like "we're shocked and grateful" are getting old. "#1 seller of children's products online" Prove it. >"We're especially pleased that Amazon.com Auctions is our fastest >growing business." Again, prove that your auctions are doing well. I'd be surprised if Amazon.com generated more than a million this quarter in revenue from their auctions. My guess is around $500,000... a very small number relative to overall sales figure.

To: Eric Wells who wrote (68633)	7/21/1999 7:18:00 PM
From: dbblg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Eric, I keep crashing the (borrowed) computer I am typing this on, so plz bear w/me. Good post. Couple thoughts: 1. I think you are being too generous w/them as far as beating the revenue and customer projections tossed around earlier today. These companies are very expensive vis a vis the projected growth precisely because people are assuming there is a lot of upside to the estimates. My own back-of-the envelope revenue estimate was substantially higher. If I follow my investing rules, I should get off here... 2. The customer count/recurring business issue is fascinating, though hard to make sense of from the outside. There is a school of thought that says AMZN's rapid sales ramp is a reflection of the ridiculous amounts of disposable income early-adopter yuppie baby boomers have, in which case customers in each successive wave will likely spend less, per capita, than their predecessors. I had expected that the ability to keep rolling out new products, as well as the larger numbers of customers in the later waves would minimize the impact of this for another 6 or 7 quarters, but the light revs. here are making me wonder about that. Anyway, best of luck with your short. FWIW, though I am probably closing my long here, I think the risk-adjusted return for shorting is probably a LOT better with the lower-quality companies like ONSL and UBID than with the leaders.

To: Eric Wells who wrote (68633)	7/21/1999 8:31:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Nice post Eric. I guess Bigger is Better - bigger losses don't much matter if the hype is ripe. This may not be the right season for the hype machine to bring it home - Amazon should churn and burn through the holiday season but may get fried in the sun before then. Even for true believers, there must be some concern that the losses are widening - particularly the -86c GAAP loss which shows more realistically the true cost of all these marvelous acquisitions that largely use investor's monopoly money as currency.

To: Eric Wells who wrote (68633)	7/22/1999 12:24:00 AM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Eric, >> 6. I have no idea why they chose to split their stock at this point in time. Anyway - those are my views - and people should keep in mind that they are biased due to the fact that I am currently short AMZN. Would be great to hear the views of others. With my luck, the stock will gap up 10 tomorrow, and I will lose on my short. << My expectation is the stock will gap down tomorrow and go into double digits prior to the split. If they keep going at this rate, it will get to single digits (with a couple of these idiotic splits). Unfortunately, I have 200 long shares.