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Non-Tech : BANK ONE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Big Dog who wrote (313)	2/13/2000 2:02:00 PM
From: BWAC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 466

<Questions his investment in ONE, but comfortable at any price for CSCO?> Strange isn't it. Makes me want to bring all my mutual fund money home. These type guys are just running around with their head cut off trying to keep up with the fund next door. It's not about investing, or even any conceptual professional thinking. It is all about chasing returns at any risk. Pile In, Pile it on, and Pile out. Go with the mo. And all this chasing is easy to do with other people's money. It's amazing the risk you can assume for others when their only recourse against you is your job. As long as the risk works everybody is happy. Now CSCO is a great company. But they are not going to take over the world. (Well actually they might if people keep throwing money at their stock.) It's at least 60% overvalued, even considering their growth rate and potential growth prospects. 2.56 Billion earnings/ 448 Billion market cap. = .5% return by earnings. If I had 448 Billion, I'd just put it in the bank and earn 6%. That's 12 times what CSCO, the company, is making. But hey, invest on.

To: Big Dog who wrote (313)	2/27/2000 12:12:00 PM
From: Big Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 466

State of the Web: Banks Under Pressure By James J. Cramer 2/27/00 10:00 AM ET Where does the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street hit home? Where does the decline in the New York Stock Exchange/S&P 500 names do the most damage? I think it might be the banks. Here's why: The bank stocks are under tremendous pressure. They go down pretty much every day. One look at the yields at Bank One (ONE:NYSE - news - boards) and First Union (FTU:NYSE - news - boards) -- both north of 6% -- even though they aren't losing money. This is extraordinary. We don't see yields like this except during times of extreme stress in the banking industry. While neither of these companies has executed that well, it's no secret that they're being punished, along with the rest of the industry, for the boom time in the economy. The Fed has one instrument -- short-term rates -- to cool things off. And it wants to cool things off, regardless of the fabulous productivity and the tremendous gains in the economy that the Web has brought. Obviously, these gains can't be measured by the data the Fed is using because away from the New Economy, not only is there no inflation, there is terrible deflation. If I were running a bank, I think I'd be faced with a difficult decision. I know I'd have just spent hundreds of millions of dollars to be Y2K compliant (why didn't IBM (IBM:NYSE - news - boards) or Unisys (UIS:NYSE - news - boards) tell me about this when I installed their stuff years ago? Did they create this problem to stimulate their own demand?). Now I would want to spend billions making sure that my company was the most Net-centric wireless Internet bank in the world. I would want secure access to my account from my customers' cell phones. And I would like to offer my customers banking and trading worldwide, both online and off. Alas, however, my stock is tanking. I want to support my stock. So I'm faced with a terrible choice: Buy the tech I need, or buy back the stock I can't bear to see this low. I know they're probably thinking the exact same thing at Merck (MRK:NYSE - news - boards) and Bristol-Myers (BMY:NYSE - news - boards) and Lilly (LLY:NYSE - news - boards). They see their stocks on the 52-week low list, too. They know they have bought back billions upon billions of dollars at much, much higher prices. Just as I have. What do I do? To me the choice is clear: You have to spend for the future. Otherwise, AOL (AOL:NYSE - news - boards) and Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - boards) and Nokia (NOK:NYSE - news - boards) will become the banks of the future. But will institutions sell my stock if I don't support it? Oddly, what Greenspan might be doing with his tightening is shifting my free cash flow from tech to the stock market to help my ailing securities. That would be the true shame of the tightenings. But I know that's what is going to happen. What a silly way to run an economy!