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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pruguy who wrote (28261)	9/25/1999 10:34:00 PM
From: Frederick Smart	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 42771

Funny, Mysterious Day.... Made it back on SI. But those AOL postings from this morning were deleted from the AOL board. Perhaps this is par for the course for conspiracy theorists. In the meantime, I was chatting with several professional option market makers yesterday toward the end of the close about this "Microsoft thing." The truth is these guys are largely mechanics - fighting for delta, gamma and theta to align enough to "tick" them enough juice to pay their $4000-5000 monthly seat lease plus a living. The game in options is to survive and simply "be there" when the sh__ hits the fan. When volatility rears it's ugly head premiums soar and the average "Joe Option" trader can make his quarter in an hour to a day sometimes. Those type of days are falling far and few between the many tedious days of boredom. Don't get me wrong, these guys make great livings, but it's really dog eat dog and now with dually listed options big bites of competitive orderflow have shifted between markets these past few months. DELL is now 50/50 Philly/Chicago after Philly having a monopoly for many years. Several big dicount BDs are in the process of banding together behind a virtual option trading ECN. 80 traders used to be in the DELL pit in Philly and the 40 who remain could be down to fewer when the new exchange/system kicks in. As for Gates & Balmer, I do think they have some disclosing and explaining to do to the SEC. If they get away with cooking their books, then others could do the same. Profits would artificially increase and we'd have the Dell/Cisco/Microsoft/AOL being applied to many many more issues. If "everyone does it" then I guess we really have entered a "New Era." "Everyone does it" celebrates Cintonian ethics. Perhaps we could learn much from Russian business and bankers before this is all over. Latest count is tha $40+ % of Russia is controlled by gangs. Anyone have any more thoughts on aggregating and consolidating netowkrs of people in the DigitalMe platform? Should be interesting to see what happened in my case with both AOL and Microsft. Peace.