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Technology Stocks : XLA or SCF from Mass. to Burmuda -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Puck who wrote (173)	12/23/1999 8:51:00 AM
From: majaman1978	Respond to of 1116

Good grief this is gapping to 177 this AM.

To: Puck who wrote (173)	12/23/1999 10:47:00 AM
From: Triffin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1116

This may explain some of the price action .. ------------------------------------------------------ To close, I have a funny story to share with you about Celera. It comes from Philip Marston, a neighbor and Fool whose wit I've drawn off of once or twice in the past in this column. Philip did this, and you can do what he did: Go to Yahoo! Finance (quote.yahoo.com). Type in "Celera." It will say "no quote." But it offers a link: "Try Symbol Lookup." So hit that, and then type in (again) "Celera." Go ahead! (After reading this column.) Notice what happens... it gives you the (incorrect) ticker symbol "XLA." Now hit that and check the chart this week, both the volume and the price movement. Look familiar? What to make of it? You make the call. ----------------------------------------------------------- Jim in CT ... CRA anyone ?????????

To: Puck who wrote (173)	12/27/1999 6:23:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1116

Something to think about: "SMARTMONEY.COM: Xcelera Accelerates By Paul R. La Monica Smartmoney.com NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Wow! I was only gone for a little more than a week but who knew I'd miss so much (especially since the last two weeks of December are usually very boring times for us financial scribes)? But there was the Nasdaq flirting with 4000. Monsanto (MTC) and Pharmacia & Upjohn (PNU) announced a big merger. Bank One (ONE) CEO John McCoy got the boot following the company's credit-card disaster. And then there was the news I wish I was around to write about: the insider-trading scandal involving Jim McDermott, the former head of investment-banking boutique Keefe Bruyette & Woods, and his ex-mistress, a Canadian porn actress who goes by the name of Marylin Star. But one story that didn't get a lot of coverage last week is the 156.0% rise in just four days of trading of Xcelera.com (XLA), a company I first wrote about the day after Thanksgiving. This post-Christmas Xcelera column may become a new tradition. As a matter of fact, since I gave a nod to my Dad's culinary prowess in the first Xcelera column I'm going to do it again today. The new addition to his seafood extravaganza this Christmas Eve (which includes old standbys like scungilli in hot sauce and baked calamari stuffed with bread crumbs, raisins and pine nuts) was scallops breaded with crushed garlic croutons and broiled in a horseradish and mustard sauce. Mmm. The man can cook. OK, back to Xcelera. Why did the stock take off last week? First, a quick refresher. Xcelera is a strange little outfit that changed its name from the Scandinavia Co. to Xcelera in October. Xcelera is headquartered in the Grand Cayman Islands, owns a hotel in the Canary Islands and its CEO and chairman Alexander Vik lives in Connecticut. But Xcelera's stock has been one of the top performers of the year because of optimism about its Internet (surprise!) subsidiary Mirror Image, a company that produces technology to speed up delivery of content over the Web. On Dec. 17 Xcelera announced a 2-for-1 stock split. This is the third split in just four months. The stock popped 10.1% that day. Then there was the news that Hewlett-Packard (HWP) was making a $32 million investment in the company. The investment is a mixture of stock and convertible debt. Finally, Xcelera announced on Thursday that it had hired former EMC (EMC) executive Cosmo Santullo to be CEO of Mirror Image. Santullo had worked for IBM (IBM) for 20 years before joining EMC last year. Investors obviously liked the news. The stock soared 26.9% the day of the H-P announcement and another 21.2% after Xcelera announced Santullo's hiring. What now? I have to admit that I was very queasy writing a fairly positive piece about the stock back in November. At that time, Xcelera had already enjoyed a 2860% runup for the year. How can a stock like this continue to go up? Hey, if the Nasdaq can gain more than 80% in a year, anything is possible. Since my first Xcelera column, the stock is up another 332.4% and now has a positively obscene 12,700% return for the year. With that in mind, I'd pull the chips from the table at this point if you are an XLA investor. And if you're thinking about buying the stock now, I'd stay away. Why? Unlike with the newly public cache-management companies like Akamai Technologies (AKAM) and CacheFlow (CFLO), it is incredibly difficult to find information on Xcelera. There's no coverage from Wall Street analysts and because of its foreign headquarters, Xcelera does not file quarterly reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can download Xcelera's annual filing from its Web site. And this makes the rise last week (and all of this year for that matter) even scarier. Sure, there's a sense of validation of the Mirror Image technology because a heavyweight like Hewlett-Packard is making an investment. Vik says H-P will be marketing the technology in addition to using it for its own business. But $32 million is peanuts for the likes of H-P and amounts to just about 3.6% of what Xcelera's market value was on the day of the announcement. And sure, snagging a former IBM exec as the CEO of Mirror Image is a nice coup, but is the hiring of one person worth a 21% rise in the stock? At one point on Thursday Xcelera was up more than 45%. That's simply ridiculous. But I don't think you should short Xcelera either. In fact, one short seller who no longer has a position in Xcelera says it is awfully tough for a short to make a killing in Xcelera because it is so illiquid (there are 13.2 million shares outstanding but the float is just 3 million). Making matters worse for shorts is that the majority of the shares are owned by the Vik and two of his brothers and a holding company they control, so, the short maintains, it is very easy for the Viks to squeeze the shorts by aggressively promoting the stock. That may sound like sour grapes, but he's got a point. In a market where retail investors are grasping for anything Internet related, fluffy press releases about a company that is in the same business as IPO hot-shot Akamai can attract a certain amount of attention among some traders. The stock split will make the stock more liquid and theoretically less volatile since there will be 26.4 million shares available. But the Viks will still control the majority. And institutional ownership, another sign that Wall Street likes the stock, is still lacking. According to Morningstar, there is only one mutual fund with a position in the stock, the same one that was a holder when I wrote about Xcelera a month ago. Now could Xcelera continue to go up and make me look stupid for doubting it? Certainly. But even with the investment from H-P, I'd still be a little wary of a company that has virtually no institutional support, no available equity research and a limited operating history in the Internet business (after all, the primary source of the company's revenue is still its hotel). And there remains very little information about the company's financial situation. If Xcelera actually announces an IPO for Mirror Image, it would be a different story, because then at least you know someone other than the Viks will be scrutinizing the company's books and there will have to be more disclosure about its operations. But unless that happens, investors have every right to be wary. Even if Mirror Image winds up gaining a large foothold in the content-delivery market, a nearly 13,000% one-year gain is going to be tough to top, don't you think?"