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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mighty Mizzou who wrote (35260)	5/10/2000 10:04:00 AM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 77400

Don't worry about Doltman!. He's just melting down as his life falls apart, and will be hospitalized shortly. Hopefully, this will speed up the process: contraryinvestor.com <<< Cisco Fever ... Overnight fever, night fever, they know how to do it. Barron's, that is. Yes, we've all heard about the cover story over the weekend. Surprise, surprise. Finally a mainstream publication put it in print. (We were seriously wondering what was taking them so long.) Now it's finally out in the open as opposed to being within the sole province of the bearish web commentators such as ourselves. What we find important in the Cisco cover story has nothing to do with the story at all. In bear markets, negative information that has plainly been in public view for years and has been summarily dismissed, all of a sudden takes on importance and a sense of truth. It's when this "new found" truth translates into selling that you know the bear has arrived. This, in our humble opinion, is the key to the future of Cisco as a stock. We also believe that this could be a real conceptual lynchpin for the market as a whole. If this new "discovery" acts to change perceptions of a market icon, it will be a much broader statement on the entire market environment. Technically, Cisco was already beginning to limp anyway. Barron's just came along and kicked its good leg. You know that this is not the first time Barron's has dropped a factual bomb on a favored stock. A few years ago, they did a very negative piece on GE. Wildly overpriced, a financial services company in sheep's clothing, etc. They did another eye opener on GE some months back. In a wildly bullish market, none of that "behind the curtain" stuff even mattered. GE skipped merrily higher on a sea of managed quarterly results and perceptions that GE's growth was truly eternal. When less than optimistic company information that has essentially "been there all along" starts to matter to investors, change is truly in the air. The final act remains to be played out in the confidence destruction derby. One stock car at a time. Don't worry, we all have front row seats. Remember, bear markets are a process of confidence destruction. Cisco's Friday purchase of tiny Arrowpoint simply added an extra dose of gunpowder to the Barron's journalistic cannon. What is quite interesting is that CSCO purchased Arrowpoint just five short weeks after Arrowpoint came public. The folks at Cisco aren't exactly asleep at the switch. Why wait until after the market has pumped additional helium into the Arrowpoint balloon before buying the company? Good for Arrowpoint shareholders. Bad for diluted Cisco shareholders. (You may remember that CSCO purchased Cerent just prior to the latter's own IPO.) The only explanation we can come up with is that exorbitant prices are being extorted from CSCO for state of the art technology. To be so near an IPO in Cerent's case must mean that initial attempts to purchase the company while private failed and that CSCO was forced to cough in the eleventh hour to stop an IPO from potentially ballooning the price further. Obviously, if we are anywhere near correct, things did not go so well in the case of Arrowpoint. To be forced to pay well above the IPO price just five weeks earlier, CSCO must have felt they needed Arrowpoint awfully bad. Alternatively, if Cisco is anywhere near right in the value it paid, Arrowpoint should be preparing a lawsuit against its underwriters. Clearly, making acquisitions is getting a lot tougher for CSCO. >>>