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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (68560)	10/2/1999 4:33:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike, if you have your Barron's there next to you, could you see what the AMG.DATA figure was for fund inflow last week? They now show it on a moving banner that (on my laptop, anyway) jerks along so I can't see if there's a dot in the middle of "15"; I suspect it was 1.5 billion and not 15 billion. TrimTabs reported 2.5 billion. Is it my imagination or in the last few days have there been a larger proportion of gabby-faces on TV counseling some degree of caution about the market?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (68560)	10/2/1999 6:15:00 PM
From: Giordano Bruno	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike, now you too can anticipate the FED's next move... -g- Subject 29742

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (68560)	10/4/1999 10:57:00 AM
From: Cynic 2005	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 132070

To all, This week's Barron's review! Mike must have been too busy to write a review. I thought this week's Barron's was a great issue. Since I have had some time to burn between my flights, I read most of it and thought that may be I can fill-in for Mike. -g- 1. "Half-Full or Half-Empty" - Johnathan Laing (a habitual bear basher) actually has a good piece on both bull and bear cases for the market. He present the view points of two bears and three bulls. Ed 'Metereni' and Ken Safian produced an absolutely convincing bear case as opposed to the pollayana mantras of Lamb Biriyani (for Laszlo Birinyi) Herr Cohen and Tom Glavin. Glavin "..senses yet another bear-market head-fake this time around. In fact, he's predicting a Millennium Melt-Up" kicking off this January that will boost the S&P to his target of 1680 and the Dow to 13,000 by year end 2000." Ed Meter sees DOW hitting 8000 by yearend and then heading to 15,000 by 2005. One quote from the article that gave me a chuckle: remember: Laszlo Birinyi of Birinyi Associates in Connecticut, likewise dismisses many of the bears' concerns. As a mechanism that looks into the future, the stock market has long since discounted all the worries, such as rising commodity prices, the dollar's weakness and rising interest rates, he insists. "Real bear markets come when nothing seems to be going wrong," he avers. Learn it from these guys folks - being a contrarian is to reject what is out there! Duh! 2. Tom Donlan writes an editorial piece "Flooded Economy? A bubble is not as dangerous as a person who wants to pop it!" Basically what he argues that if no one tries to pop it, even if we have a bubble - we will do just fine and the good times will continue. He contends that BoJ attempt to pop the bubble has caused all the problems for Japan and they should not have done what they did! He never mentions about the dislocations in other markets - such as falling dollar. Nor does he mention the fact that SEA bubbles and Russian popped despite any bubble popping efforts by central bankers'. I know what the pollayana's will say to this - US is not SEA or Russia. Dumb argument! 3. Perhaps the best piece in this issue is the interview with Olstein in "A Nose for Value . . . And Nonsense." He pooh-poohs the corporate accounting scams, beat-by-a-penny surprises, sell-side analysts, daytraders and mo-mo players. A direct quote: Not all companies, not at all. But for us, an upside surprise sometimes raises a red flag. The penny itself isn't material, but the seeming need to produce an upside surprise, even a tiny one, makes us wonder what else is going on. Has business turned much tougher? The government has made us all more conscious of accounting abuses, but below the surface no one's really paying attention. Companies still are smoothing quarterly earnings by front-ending revenues, or booking sales well ahead of product shipments, as Sunbeam infamously did. Corporations are still playing with doubtful account reserves, and taking multiple "nonrecurring" charges, which makes it very difficult to determine the underlying growth rate of earnings. Let me emphasize that many of these practices are perfectly legal. But the net results can be misleading. This interview is a must read! 4. And then there is an anti-church article against the church of Intel. The article essentially says what Mike, Earlie, Fleck and Fred Hickey have been saying. The glory days for Intel are OVER! The competition is here to stay! It is interesting to note that no sooner than the article was published, zillions of "contrarians" have surfaced on SI to bet against Barron's! Folks, again, contrarian can not be mistaken for contra-contrarian, which essentially is trend following (thank you, Joe G!) 5. There is an article that gives credit to Volcker (where it is due) for the economic expansion of the 90s. An interesting read. 6. Abelson is bullish - on Gold that is - and makes a case for Gold.com for 400 in short-order, or is t by the orders of the shorts? -g- 7. Review of the 3rd Q perrformers reveals a few fantastic winners, the basis of their performance, of course, is fantasy! With the broad market going nowhere over the September quarter, individual stocks had to make their own excitement. Dot-com names helped firms like StarTek, an NYSE-listed firm that's reserved a bunch of Internet domain names, and Amex-listed Flightserv.com, which used to be in real estate. These companies have grand plans to offer services over the 'Net, as does the quarter's standout stock: Scandinavia. On the Amex, that Cayman Islands-registered firm's shares nearly quintupled on its yet-unfulfilled ambition to build networks of caching servers to speed up the World Wide Web. Ursus Telecom soared on the Nasdaq amid Wall Street's frenzy for Internet phone calling services.