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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (14460)	8/14/1999 9:26:00 AM
From: Jeff Jordan	Respond to of 29970

smartmoney.com Once upon a time, AOL's ability to connect consumers to the Internet was enough to turbocharge its stock. AOL soared shortly after it sold most of its network real estate to MCI WorldCom (WCOM) in exchange for the CompuServe database in late 1997. Investors saw the deal as a way for the company to focus on its virtual real estate, the Web sites and user accounts that attracted advertisers and subscribers. A year later, AOL added to that virtual real estate when it bought Netscape and entered into cahoots with Sun Microsystems (SUNW) to plow the corporate market. But since then, physical real estate -- the wires that deliver Internet access -- has given competitors such as AT&T (T) ways to sell competing high-speed Internet access in conjunction with phone service or other incentives. AOL responded by forging partnerships with high-speed phone companies and a broad swath of content providers. This alliance flurry is no short-term strategy. "[CEO Steve] Case is very smart; he is going to have problems [if] access is going to become a commodity," says an executive at another Internet-service company, who asked not to be identified. "He's going to be constantly forced to give away more stuff and sell access as other things." So AOL loads up exclusive content on its sites in the hope that almost every consumer will find something desirable there and nowhere else. Content, specifically e-commerce, is harder to duplicate than access, email or instant messaging. So expect to see AOL pursuing more deals with online merchants. Trouble is, you can expect to see Yahoo! (YHOO) and Excite At Home (ATHM) and any other Internet company with enough bucks do the same thing. And all of AOL's other irritants -- AT&T locking it (for now) out of high-speed cable systems; Microsoft and others dangling free Internet access -- still dog the stock. That may explain the Street's muted response to the Novell pact; the shares only picked up 0.4%. Even Henry Blodget, Merrill Lynch's AOL bull, warned clients in a note that the next 18 months would "not be a walk in the park" for the company

To: E. Davies who wrote (14460)	8/14/1999 11:42:00 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Quite correct. You aren't hearing any crowing from the many in mutual funds who are under water and have been so since 4/98, the internal stock market top. The market breadth which has been one of the few worthwhile TA indicators has been seriously diverging from price for at least a year and longer depending upon how wide the stock inclusion. The NASDAQ breadth divergence has been unprecedented and has a beginning somewhere around 1984. CSCO is the COMPQX. The so-called bull market is IPO and big company, wild speculation and monopoly, courtesy of a permissive FED. Meanwhile the press whips up the public into a speculative frenzy which is finally coming apart at the seams and exposing the ever-growing mass losses. People never talk about their losses nor their under performance so the charade continues. When this bear market rally is over the next leg down will start dismembering the big company stocks and so you'll hear the public say, "we might be in a bear market".