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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zia Sun(zsun) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: c.horn who wrote (6868)	2/23/2000 10:00:00 AM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Respond to of 10354

"The SEC rejected rejected three Berkshire Hathaway requests to keep certain portfolio names confidential, forcing the firm to disclose recent activities. Berkshire Moves May Be Posted More Often Following SEC Ruling What is Warren Buffett up to? It is a question that investors, looking for clues to copy the activity of the celebrated investor, have been asking for at least a couple of decades. But until now, they have had to wait a year after the fact to find out exactly what Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is buying and selling. Now, that may be changing. The Securities and Exchange Commission has turned down three Berkshire requests for permission to keep certain Berkshire portfolio moves confidential, a ruling that has forced Berkshire to publicly disclose recent investment moves well in advance of the company's wishes. Berkshire has long made use of a little-known SEC regulation that allows institutional holders to keep their investing activities from the public for as long as a year. Berkshire officials, who historically have declined to comment on the company's investing moves, didn't return a phone call to their Omaha, Neb., headquarters. The SEC's decision for now applies only to Berkshire requests to keep from the public's eyes certain company holdings at the ends of the first three quarters of 1999. Ironically, the SEC's action comes at a time when Mr. Buffett's earlier ability to move a company's shares higher simply by showing interest in the stock is waning. Berkshire's share performance has been lackluster lately because of the company's big exposure to the insurance sector as well as Mr. Buffett's aversion to technology stocks. The filings in question involve SEC Form 13F reports that institutional investors with more than $100 million in stockholdings are required to disclose at the end of each quarter. Such investors can shield their stock picks for about a year, however, by asking the SEC for a delay in the public release of those forms. To get such a dispensation, the investors must prove that disclosure of their portfolio changes could disrupt their investing strategy. Berkshire has long used the confidential format to cloak some of the more actively traded stocks in its portfolio, while reporting some of its other, long-held, stocks in more conventional filing documents. Each of the three so-called 13F-HR documents seeking disclosure delays by Berkshire noted that the company originally had filed them "pursuant to a request for confidential treatment," but that the requests had all been denied on Feb. 4. "Berkshire has chosen not to appeal the denial of confidentiality as to these securities," the filings note, "even though Berkshire believes that its confidentiality request was appropriate." While refusing to discuss Berkshire's situation in particular, Douglass Scheidt, who is associate chief counsel of the SEC's investment-management division, noted that the SEC automatically extends confidentiality for certain investments that are part of an "ongoing purchase acquisition or disposition" to protect the institutional holder's ability to get the best price for a stock. But once the SEC decides that confidentiality is no longer merited -- typically after reviewing a cluster of recent filings by the holder -- it withdraws its permission for the stockholdings involved, the SEC attorney noted. Mr. Buffett's use of the confidential 13F has caused controversy in the past. In 1997, Berkshire shifted its hefty Wells Fargo & Co. stake from its public filings to its nonpublic documents; confused investors misinterpreted the unexplained disappearance of the Wells Fargo stake as evidence Mr. Buffett had dumped his holding in the bank's stock -- and Wells Fargo shares suffered a sell-off until the confusion was cleared up. The following year, the SEC announced it was tightening its oversight of confidentiality requests, saying its staffers would "deny any confidential-treatment request that doesn't make a compelling showing of need." Berkshire isn't the only investing company that shrouds its actions with the confidential forms. Cascade Investment LLC, the investment vehicle for Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, has made use of the form, as has investor George Soros's hedge fund. Though Berkshire's actions are closely watched, its portfolio of equity investments -- which is focused on providers of financial services and consumer staples including Gillette Co., Coca-Cola Co. and American Express Co. -- hasn't performed particularly well of late, as Mr. Buffett's adherence to the "value investing" techniques has kept the company out of the high-tech sector. The decline in investors' esteem for his stock-picking skills was underscored when Berkshire earlier this month disclosed a big reduction in its General Dynamics Corp. holding as well as substantial new stakes in such companies as Liz Claiborne Inc., Jones Apparel Group Inc., Dun & Bradstreet Corp. and GATX Corp. The news didn't appear to cause any change in the stocks of the companies involved. Berkshire's complex filings Tuesday indicate, among other things, that the reputed technophobe Mr. Buffett apparently took an undisclosed, and modest, flier in Microsoft Corp.: Berkshire had accumulated $16.7 million in Microsoft preferred Class A shares by the end of the 1999 third quarter, according to one of Tuesday's amended 13Fs. The Microsoft A shares, which matured in mid-December, didn't appear in Berkshire's year-end public list of holdings."

To: c.horn who wrote (6868)	2/25/2000 11:58:00 AM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10354

"At first glance, there was nothing unusual about the Capital Growth Report when it arrived in Backspace's snail-mail box. Of equal parts financial jargon and hype, the report - which charges US$78 for a year's subscription to what appeared to be four badly laid-out pages per month - seemed a typical tech-stock newsletter. What made Backspace choke on his morning coffee was the pick of the month: an obscure public Internet company called ZiaSun Technologies. ZiaSun was known as Momentum Internet when it was based in Hong Kong. Three years ago, a magazine called The Dataphile revealed that Momentum was behind a stable of porn Web sites and phone chat lines that promised Bangkok Babes and China Dolls. Thousands of spam messages advertising these services were sent from Momentum's free e-mail service. While not admitting the spamming, Momentum and now ZiaSun president Anthony Tobin told Technology Post last year that the company no longer ran sex-related businesses. Instead, ZiaSun has latched on to other Web trends. It has an Asian search engine, a stock-trading portal, a financial news service, an advertising network and an auction site called AsiaForSale. It moved to San Diego in 1998 when it began trading over the counter in the US, while keeping most Web operations in Asia, mainly in Hong Kong and Manila. While the company claims to be profitable on modest revenues - $9 million in the second quarter last year - it has been criticised by day traders and investors in the US, who have tried to puncture those claims. Mr Tobin had ZiaSun respond by suing several day-trading and investment sites for alleged defamation. While ZiaSun likes to hype its Web sites - 45 press releases last year - it doesn't appear to be making much money. Most of ZiaSun's revenues came from two off-line subsidiaries, a Philippine-based printing business called Momentum Asia and a US learn-how-to-day-trade seminar which charges $3,995 a head, according to Mr Tobin. So Backspace was puzzled why the editor of Capital Growth Report would hold such an optimistic view of ZiaSun's prospects. 'The company has a dominant position in the exploding Asian Internet market . . . We expect that ZiaSun stock will soon be valued with that of profitable peers such as CMGI, now trading in the [US]$80 range.' A visit to Capital Growth's site (www.capitalg.com) shows it is designed and maintained by Momentum Internet and that Capital Growth offers ZiaSun's Swiftrade stock-trading service to subscribers. Isn't co-operation and alliance-building among Web companies heartening? scmp.com business.scmp.com

To: c.horn who wrote (6868)	3/5/2000 10:33:00 AM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10354

The Industry Standard takes a well deserved swipe at WSJ reporting of ZSUN case. [Mr. Goldfinger concurs and will assist the IS in it's quest for understanding]: "Will Details Follow on ZiaSun's Stock Chat Lawsuit? Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not necessarily thorough news accounts. Media coverage of the dismissal of ZiaSun Technologies' defamation lawsuit against eight posters of stock-board messages was short to the point of being incomplete. ZiaSun is a little-known company whose shares trade on the over-the-counter bulletin board, according to TheStreet.com. Last June, it accused eight Silicon Investor chatters of defaming it. On Jan. 21, ZiaSun won a preliminary injunction against one of the posters, Floyd Schneider, preventing him from making "false statements" about ZiaSun while the case was pending, the Wall Street Journal reported. Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman threw out the case, saying that the Seattle location for the suit was not the proper venue. ZiaSun had filed the suit there because it's the location of Silicon Investor's headquarters. The judge didn't buy that line of reasoning and tossed out the case. Judge Pecham's decision also voided her earlier injunction, against the posters, the Journal reported. The muffling of Schneider "struck a nerve in the freewheeling world of Internet stock chatter," the paper wrote. "It also surprised many legal experts, who said it was unusual for such restraints to be granted in cases where freedom of speech was an issue." What did ZiaSun do to inspire the vigorous criticism, alleged to include thousands of postings? Details were sketchy. The Journal noted that ZiaSun alleged that the defendants had wrongly accused the company and its executives of a scheme to mislead and defraud investors. The cyber dissing was a conspiracy to drive down its stock price, ZiaSun countered, according to the Journal. All the brouhaha begs the question: If the issue was serious enough to constitute a free-speech conflict, shouldn't outlets have provided a few more details? What exactly were the defendants posting? Is there any truth to the allegations, however loudmouthed they might be? What kind of business is ZiaSun in? No one bothered to tell readers. News reports pegged Schneider's online handle as The Truthseeker. If only the media were as enthusiastic. thestandard.net