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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (48363)	3/3/2001 1:47:56 PM
From: Joe Lyddon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57584

If Napster started charging a fee for copyrighted material, whereby royalties would be paid, wouldn't it workout to everyone's satisfaction? The charge could be small due to low overhead. Just a thought. . . I've never been there & don't use it. Joe

To: American Spirit who wrote (48363)	3/3/2001 2:03:16 PM
From: Rande Is	Respond to of 57584

Napster could emerge as a hip small player offering upstart new bands product. They could. But they won't. It was never about the music for them. . . just the money they could make by distributing top name artists music to all comers. There is no money in marketing garage band music, nor will there ever be, in my opinion.

To: American Spirit who wrote (48363)	3/3/2001 8:13:48 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57584

GET RID OF ALL ANALYSTS>................NYT today........ As Stocks Fall, Some Analysts Prosper By SAUL HANSELL s technology stocks advanced in the last few years, so did Henry Blodget. A 35-year-old with wavy blond hair whose optimism shone as strong as the market's, he transformed himself from aspiring journalist into one of Wall Street's best-known analysts and a fixture on CNBC, his pay rising into the millions. Today, the market is bloodied, but not Mr. Blodget. His top recommendations are down 79 percent, on average, from the beginning of last year, with several trading for less than $1. But Mr. Blodget, the senior Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage, keeps his chin up. "Things change," he said last week, furrowing his brow after every few words. "The market went from saying, 'We like companies that are growing quickly but are losing a lot of money' to saying, 'We want to see earnings.' It's very hard to predict a 180-degree turn like that." Not that Mr. Blodget's picks, often delivered with caveats, were demonstrably worse than those of some other Internet analysts. Last August, in fact, he started to turn somewhat more cautious. But the story of how Mr. Blodget and others like him encouraged investors to bid stocks up to levels he now admits were unjustifiable goes a long way toward explaining why the market for technology stocks has since crashed. Just one year ago this Saturday, the Nasdaq index, the new economy's leading barometer, peaked at 5,049. On Friday, it closed at 2,117, down 58 percent over the past 12 months. The sell-off of technology stocks continued to unfold last week, as did the consequences. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has said that the market's drop endangers the health of the economy, as corporations and consumers suddenly find themselves less wealthy. Looking back a year after the peak, it is clear that prices were bid up to astronomical levels in part because of a contagious euphoria, infecting not just minor day traders but huge international firms like Merrill — and Mr. Blodget, who had accurately called shots as the market rose, was in the center of it. "When someone appears to be right, they become larger than life," said Peter Bernstein, a veteran consultant to big money managers. Watching fortunes being made from the Internet, investors were looking for reasons to believe and leaders to follow. Analysts like Mr. Blodget obliged. "All the tinder was ready waiting for the match to be lit," Mr. Bernstein said. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the financial world — and perhaps one of the explanations for the euphoria that gripped Wall Street during the boom years — is that Mr. Blodget may have served his employer well by being wrong over the last year. It was clear to many market veterans that young companies were being accorded values based more on fantasy than finance. But the profits being made by investors and firms were quite real. If Merrill had an analyst spinning doomsday scenarios, it would not lure high-tech companies as clients for initial public offerings, among Wall Street's most lucrative activities. But neither could the company risk legal action by armies of widows who lost their savings when the bubble burst, as it surely would. So Mr. Blodget served both audiences. He carefully alternated buy recommendations and sky-high target prices with cautions about volatility, and advice for investors to limit their dot-com holdings to just a fraction of their portfolios. He made headlines when he said 75 percent of Internet companies would fail.