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

To: Jan Crawley who wrote (76926)	9/8/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: Eric Wells	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>>For I believe the high risk is inherent and the >>"so-called high reward" at the other end... Jan - thanks for your message. I sometimes fear I am too negative - that I will be remembered as the guy who was constantly crying wolf, while others were making a bundle going long, when Amazon reaches a trillion dollar market cap and the DOW hits 36,000. It's difficult for me to invest in this market, however, solely on momentum, or hoping to making profits off of greater fools. I believe our current market conditions have resulted in a significant change in the dynamics of entrepreneurship. I may be mistaken, but it seems that at some point in the past, if you were an entrepreneur and you believed in a business idea, you would risk your own capital and the capital you could raise from others to pursue the idea - and the entrepreneur and those that provided the capital would not realize a reward for the pursuit of the idea until the idea was proven successful. In today's market, high levels of speculation have resulted in entrepreneurs being rewarded years in advance of their ideas being proven successful. And it will be the case (and is already so in many cases) that many entrepreneurs will be rewarded handsomely for very unsuccessful ideas. This is a waste of capital. Of course some capital needs to be wasted in order to weed out the good ideas from the bad. However, in our markets, I think the amount of capital that is being "wasted" by rewarding insiders before their companies are successful as being excessive - extremely excessive. And the speculative nature of today's market has shifted the risk of that capital. The entrepreneur and the early providers of capital bear very little risk - our markets reward them just for taking the risk of pursuing the idea. Yet, if they are so readily rewarded, there really is no risk on their part. So who bears the risk. The individual investor who trades the stock after the IPO. And it is the individual investor who is fooled by the recommendation of the investment banking analyst, whose recommendations are not based on any sort of educated analysis of future business prospects, but are rather highly influenced by the portfolio of the investment bank. You could be Einstein and lose money in this market. You could be clairvoyant, in possession of a crystal ball that let's you see the future, and still lose money in this market. Because internet and internet infrastructure stocks do not trade on any sort of educated analysis of future business prospects. They trade on something else. So why don't we just change the name "NASDAQ" to "CASINO" and at least be honest. Thanks for your message - and apologies if I am overly-negative. -Eric