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

To: ahhaha who wrote (17168)	11/19/1999 10:45:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29970

Thought some of you sophisticates would get a kick out of a blow-by-blow analysis of today's action. The stock gapped up at the open, sold down, went back up and then slid into what looked like trouble. In mid-morning it based and underwent price compression. Around lunch the 100 share orders kept coming in on the buy side forcing the MM to raise the ask. It was relentless. By 13:30 it looked like the rally which then had price climbed up to 49'6 was going to gas out. A series of rising frequency 100 share orders then started flowing in. The MMs had to back up. At 13:38 price breached 49'7, cooled on 1000 share hits, and then someone bought 100 shares at 50 at 13:40. The MM was out of stock and had to short to meet the demand. That's when the order flow rose from 30/minute to 50/minute, a deluge of 100 share orders. You could hear the MM panic. "Back it up"! Larger lots came in and the ask was rising fast. Most of the trades during the next 10 minutes when 2000 orders came in were below 1000 shares. The stock climbed to 52 on this lemming mass in movement. Mom and pop moved in for the kill. Then the selling started. Every transaction above 1000 shares hit the market selling with, "get me out NOW" written on the order. The money flow was decisively negative. Massive selling, but the price gave no ground. The market was inelastic relative to marginal demand. The MM had to protect against another surge from 100 share rampaging animals. As is often the case in a rapidly rising market the selling is absolutely dominant. This is hard to understand unless you understand markets. It was the intense selling and in blocks which enabled the price to rise! That's how it always works. You have to have more supply available at higher prices in order to realize an upside translation. I haven't measured as strong selling in ATHM in many months. The intensity of it was almost off the scale and yet throughout the 100 share orders just kept coming in market order to buy, buy, buy. By 14:00 another 1500 lots of below 1000 shares came in predominantly on the buy side and even though that was not comparable to the heavy block selling on a dollar volume basis, its persistence overwhelmed the MMs. The MMs had to keep the ask up to try to discourage the masses. At the same time it was the MMs who accumulated much stock from the block sales. When the market orders to sell came in there wasn't enough stock available instantaneously from the intense 100 share flow river and so the MMs had to buy. The market forced the MMs to get long on the way up. The MMs didn't want to do that because like the experts and big shots who were throwing in their stock, they "knew" the stock was over-valued. The market forced them to buy anyway and in this case it is stock-crazy America who is buying. They aren't buying in anticipation of X buys Y. They're buying because the so-called dumb public knows that ATHM is the premier play on the planet. When the market forces the MMs to buy it is highly likely that the market is going a lot higher. This is the inscrutable nature of the market. I present it to you here because today was a good example of how the machinery works. What I have said here is not understood by technicians. Only specialists and market makers know this, but even they resist its truth. They prefer to think they know all about where the stock they handle is going, because they are on the inside. Such inside information is worse than useless. They don't know any more than patzer. It's the market that makes them money as long as they do their jobs. If they try to do what 90% of SI believes, it is immaterial whether they're caught or not. What is material is that the market takes them to ruin for attempting what is in fact rarely attempted. They have to be a machine and get on the other side of the public action in order to prosper. CPQ traded 48M shares today and was the volume leader. ATHM traded 15M shares today WITH A GREATER NUMBER OF TRADES!

To: ahhaha who wrote (17168)	11/21/1999 7:46:00 PM
From: ld5030	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

The phone company is a technical monopoly similar to the cable company. It is ironic that T went from one form of monopoly to the other. When there is a technical monopoly there are no absolute choices, only a selection of lesser evils. You can have an unregulated private monopoly, a regulated private monopoly, or a government run monopoly. The latter is unbearable because there is no innovation and no customer service. Regulation is no panacea either because the regulators tend to come from industry and you get really no better prices than monopoly. The regulations inevitably erect barriers to competition under the guise of "protecting the consumers". Producer groups are much more adept and energetic about modifying their own regulations. Unregulated private monopoly is the best choice, but complacency and high prices can exist there as well. T has had many faults over the years, but compared to other nations' phone service I think we have done just fine. It's hard to fault a company that gave us the greatest invention in the history of mankind: the transistor. Without it we would not be having this conversation. Armstrong is re-making T in a $200B cable gambit. This is not the same old Ma Bell.