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

To: Tom D who wrote (70384)	7/28/1999 6:31:00 PM
From: Jan Crawley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

I sold 2000 shares of my AMZN yesterday and today, and am considering to invest $100K in ICGE. It's none of my business and I hate to bug: But I remember that; Your posts said that you sold 75% of your Amzn shares in Jan99 @120s and then bot back half of the shares you sold in Feb99 @120s. Correct? So your holding was 50% of the orig. shares until this latest selling of 2K shares? That's sorta interesting. Will you have to "pay" the LT Cap. gain first then incurred a s-t loss?

To: Tom D who wrote (70384)	7/28/1999 7:12:00 PM
From: Robert Rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Tom, I have not researched icge much, but here is my current response: <Their offering is 11% of their total number of shares outstanding: 13.5 M, vs 125M shares. Is this unusual? Off the top of my head, I don't know. DSCM just IPO'd 5M shares with a total number of shares outstanding of 42M. > 13.5M is the largest ipo offering I've come across. inkt was 2.5M. ebay was 3.5M. That was standard before 1999. Then came pcln at 10M, etys at 8.+M, MPPP at 12.3M. But to my knowledge, icge takes the cake. 125M shares outstanding at $30/share translates to a $3.75B market cap, at $60/share, a $7.5B market cap. dscm, by contrast, has ipo'd at a more reasonable level, given today's inflated market. At $30/share, its market cap would be $1.25B, at $60/share, $2.50B. Ultimately, market cap shapes stock appreciation. At $60/share, icge could roughly double to attain amzn's current market cap, while dscm at that price could increase 6-fold.... < The other factor which weighs in here is that B2B is such an enormous opportunity--$1.3 Trillion in 2003 according to Forrester--that a nominal market value of $1.5B for ICGE may be appropriate.> To play kis for a moment, that's what the big boyz want the little guys to believe. Take a hot concept, wrap it around a bundle of trash, and milk the suckers for all they're worth! (Don't know if this is the case, just proposing the worst-case scenario. How am I doing, kis?) <Merrill Lynch: pardon my naivete, here. Are they second rate, or less prestigious? > From the thousands of SI postings I've read, this is what I've gathered. HJ is better at dissecting the details of prestige rankings than I <g>, but my impression is 1) GS, 2)MS, Merrill toward or at the bottom of the big names. Merrill is viewed as the last big firm to 'get' the internet, as evidenced by Mr. 'amzn at $50' Cohen's tenure there. What big inet ipo's have they led so far? None come to my mind.... < 3) <<Why not just hold VERT?>> VERT has already tripled in 6 months. ICGE does own 37% of VERT. But the other 63% of ICGE is 36 new young B2B companies. I presume that the idea is to buy ICGE before it quadruples.> At $95/share, vert has 3.5M shares outstanding and a market cap of $1.6B. With 13.5M shares outstanding, to match a market cap of $1.6B, icge would have to trade at roughly $23/share. 'nuf said. <Does it mean anything positive to you that IBM is planning to buy $45 M worth of stock at this same price, and that GE is doing the same with $20M? If I could buy $45M or $20M worth of just about any inet at the ipo price, I'd jump at the chance. Even selling at $23/share, I'd make a bundle. (While that is a positive, that kind of investment from amzn or Paul Allen would impress me a heck of a lot more.) < I am not trying to outargue you here. I want to learn. My investment track record is rather mixed, so I need all the help I can get. I sold 2000 shares of my AMZN yesterday and today, and am considering to invest $100K in ICGE. If you know more, please respond.> Tom, if you can research icge enough to answer my reservations in your own mind, go for it. Otherwise, I would wait until dscm's quiet period is ready to expire, as you yourself have suggested, and then put that money in dscm. I am expecting dscm to trend down to about $30/share. My current thinking is that dscm is an A or A- ipo, and your professional background is a big plus in monitoring that stock for your portfolio. I invest in inets as opposed to biotechs for the same reason. btw, thanks for your input on dscm. LT, it looks like a winner! Rob