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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (23072)	4/19/2000 10:51:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

There were two posts about Siebel that I'm just now getting around to responding to. My apologies to the authors for not remembering who wrote them. One post mentioned that Siebel outperformed consensus estimates for the quarter by 40%. Not accurate by my understanding. The consensus was $.15. Excluding the one-time gain from the sale of USIX shares, EPS was $.17 that beat estimates by 13%. Including the gain, the EPS was $.19 that beat estimates by 27%. Another person asked me to respond to the issue that Siebel's sequential increase in revenues is "only" 15%. I haven't taken the time to scope out the details of the information, but it's important to remember that the Q4-to-Q1 increases are historically the smallest of the year. That's mostly because anyone buying or selling enterprise-wide software knows that the sales staff's annual bonuses can be dramatically effected by the sales results in Q4, causing Q4 to be the best quarter of the year. This is such a factor that when I first began following the front office business it was not a bad sign that a company would sell less in Q1 than in the previous Q4. More important to me than the total revenue or the sequential revenue is the year-over-year comparisons of the revenue attributed specifically to licensing the software. That's the core business Siebel is in. If the company stops licensing the software, the services side of the business will also be affected down the road. And the licensing revenue has higher margins than the services revenue. Understanding that, you can appreciate why I am elated to see that licensing revenue more than doubled compared to the year-earlier quarter. Though I haven't reviewed the older financial statements, I'm reasonably confident that this constitutes an increase in the rate of licensing growth probably due to the IBM's acquisition of the product and Big Blue's agreement to resell the product. One small tid-bit of info: if the company had reported just $35 million more in revenue it would have topped $1 billion in trailing revenue for the first time in the company's history. Not bad. Next quarter the company will blow well past that benchmark. --Mike Buckley

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (23072)	4/19/2000 11:58:00 AM
From: the dodger	Respond to of 54805

There's been a lot of discussion about margined accounts recently, and just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents worth... My day job allows me a certain level of casual, indirect access to account info of a few of the on-line brokers. My observation is that those brokerage houses boasting low commission schedules -- and you know who they are -- are definitely the more heavily margined. That low commission seems to attract a certain breed of "investor" -- in short -- that's where the day traders are clustered. It seems the higher the commission rate, the less the overall accumulated margin debt for the brokerage house. A word of comfort. While overall margin debt has soared over the last year, so has the stock market. In other words, margin debt has remained somewhat static when compared to overall account values. Day traders, as a rule, are constantly margined -- but they tend to eat their losses quickly -- most by the end of the day. So as market capitalization decreases, so does margin debt. Sadly, I have seen some limited evidence of people being more or less "wiped out" -- but it's a relative small number of accounts (I would estimate about 8% were "mortally wounded" last week -- and that was almost exclusively at the deep discount houses) -- and usually involving relatively small dollar amounts -- mostly in the 2K to 10K ballpark. Strangely enough, I think there was actually more damage done to margined accounts a week or two earlier. The "average" small investor holds a position for slightly more than seven weeks -- they tend to be "guerilla" investors, rather than "gorilla" investors -- in and out very quickly -- looking for that fast buck, so their level of margined indebtedness adjusts just as quickly. So FWIW -- I personally have not witnessed a giant build up of margin pressure -- at least from the casual, indirect evidence I have seen. "the dodger"

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (23072)	4/19/2000 1:56:00 PM
From: Jean M. Gauthier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Hi Mike, While not the investing genius of Chaz, I believe judicious use of Margin to be useful... I try to stay at 20% (or less if markets rise) of Margin and almost never really exceed it.. I mostly then use this margin to buy 2002 or later LEAPS on blue Chip companies, like Intel and others.. I use LEAPS since I missed a lot of the bull market, starting with 10,000 or so in late 1997, so I did not have much money Living in Canada makes it extremely difficult to accumulate assets for investing, with 50% marginal tax rates applied to american equivalent incomes of only $ 40,000 or so.. We lose over 50% of our total income to federal, state(provinces), municipal, regional, school taxes and user fees, and when (if ever) we sell for capital gains we pay about 40% taxes (long-term/short-term no difference) to direct taxes... Pretty tough investing environment up here. I actually used my tax refunds for 2 years straight to start my investing program. Funny huh ? <g> I bought myself some Cisco & SUN Leaps in 1998, and these, more than anything else , helped to kick-start my small portfolio... At the high of March, I was up to about 850,000 or so, but am now back down to 500,000 or so (maybe less).. Margin has helped tremendously to accumulate assets, but USED IN MODERATION.. JMO Take care Jean P.S. You must love that Siebel now heh Mike ! <g>