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To: TheStockFairy who wrote (28671)	10/16/2000 5:51:16 PM
From: IceShark	Respond to of 436258

Me.

To: TheStockFairy who wrote (28671)	10/16/2000 6:21:25 PM
From: pater tenebrarum	Respond to of 436258

the only problem is imo that this late in the cycle a new entrant in the crowded credit card game should be treated with some circumspection. can't confirm what Fleck had to say about them, but if the allegation that the books are being tortured to achieve the results is correct, i would give the business model some more time to prove itself: siliconinvestor.com Our nomination is going to be for every analyst who follows Gateway (GTW). Gateway is no longer a PC company, it's basically a consumer finance/sub-prime lender. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of balance sheets can see that there's quite an incredible game being played by this company. Last night on a conference call, Gateway allowed that it is no longer going to give unit data, ASP data or segment data. This fits nicely with the fact that they have 1,000 retail stores now and they give no same-store sales data, although when they first started doing it they said they would. So now in essence, what Gateway would like to say is, "Here are the revenue numbers and here are earnings -- trust us, we don't need to give you anything else." Then again, one should recall that the CFO who is bringing you this wonderful financial fable was also the CFO in the waning days of Boston Chicken (BOSTQ), and we all know how that story concluded. The same will befall Gateway as it opens up all these stores and finances PCs at outrageous prices to people who otherwise couldn't afford them. Even after all that, its revenue growth is nothing to crow about for a stock trading at this multiple which itself is irrelevant since the earnings are of such dubious quality. If they want to be a consumer finance company, maybe they want to sell at the same kind of multiple as a General Motors (GM) or Household International (HI), i.e., a range between 4 and 14 times earnings. For all those analysts on the call who didn't query the balance sheet and didn't complain about the fact that there will be absolutely no key data points handed out by Gateway anymore, this nomination is for you for being completely asleep at the switch.