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Technology Stocks : EXLN - Excelon -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (565)	8/1/2000 8:05:38 AM
From: hasbeen101	Respond to of 811

If you like fast growth then it wouldn't be fair to blame EXLN for not being more profitable, relatively they are far more profitable than ARBA, CMRC or WEBM. If you prefer a high net EPS you should think about your admiration of WEBM. I am certainly not a cheerleader for WEBM. In fact I do not follow them at all. I think Bob Trocchi pointed out that EXLN's profitless growth at about 25% per year didn't stack up well against WEBM's profitless growth at 300% a year. The goal is to create positive earnings. If you are profitless but growing at 300%, at least there is the reasonable expectation that you will soon become profitable due to spreading your fixed costs over a vastly enlarged revenue base. But if you are profitless and growing at 25% then all you have is hope. I think hope alone is too slender a basis for investing in a stock. My fair value target is 30 x $0.46 or $14 by spring 2001 and about $50 by 2005. As you might expect, I think that is an optimistic estimate. But, having said that, it is a reasonable estimate in that it forms a good basis for rational debate. I left this thread alone for a while because it got a bit crazy. Some of the stuff on yahoo is totally crazy. Oh, and by the way, I do hope that your estimate proves not to be optimistic, since I would like to see this company succeed. I would be even happier if there was some evidence to support that hope.

To: Elsewhere who wrote (565)	8/1/2000 8:06:18 AM
From: Bob Trocchi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 811

JJ... Actually this message is for everyone. Today I found an article on "the Street.com, reprinted below. Interesting and I do hope that EXLN is not included in this message however it is an interesting message. by the way, I am enjoying the upsurge in activity on this thread lately. Great to hear all viewpoints. Bob T. State of the Web: After the Gold Rush By James J. Cramer Originally posted at 1:49 PM ET 7/30/00 on RealMoney.com Remember those great earnings for all of those Web infrastructure companies? They seemed to roll right on through despite the collapse of the dot-com movement. That fooled a lot of people. We're now discovering the truth, which is that many of these companies were still living largely off the big March-April venture capital spending boom. A ton of money got raised in that period and was immediately put to work in the world of companies like Vignette (VIGN:Nasdaq - news), Scient (SCNT:Nasdaq - news), Viant (VIAN:Nasdaq - news) and Kana (KANA:Nasdaq - news). Now that world is in a vast retreat. The funding boom is over. These companies that provide the picks and shovels for the Net don't have a lot of new diggers coming in. It makes me think that being in the pick and shovel business in 1850, after the 49ers, must have been a pretty horrid business. What makes me so negative? Some of these companies are having a hard time getting paid. We know that by monitoring days sales outstanding, or dsos. Others are indicating that customers are cutting back on Web-site development. And the collapse of the Amazon (AMZN:Nasdaq - news) model means there won't be much of a rush for more infrastructure anytime soon. Sure, the Old World is rapidly moving online. But that build-out will conclude itself too. It won't provide enough new business for all of these players. The best hope, if you are in one of these stocks, is that another company in the vicinity will buy your company. I don't rule it out. Probably will happen. But the risk is that in the next month you come up with a shortfall in earnings. Any shortfall will move any one of these stocks appreciably lower. We don't like to buy stocks on takeover prospects if the earnings prospects aren't there. With this group, you don't have the latter, just the former. That's not enough.