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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: t_w_b who wrote (96078)	4/18/2001 8:25:54 PM
From: Lucretius	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 436258

wait for a pullbakc and get long

To: t_w_b who wrote (96078)	4/18/2001 11:03:19 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 436258

They even do this stuff by restating financials. You'll see companies restate a previous Q and find expenses that should have been posted in the earlier Q.....as if these guys don't have the most sophisticated financial software to give them up to the minute P/L they "find" expenses a quarter later. Front loading the Q was a game perfected by the guys in Redmond. If your Q is cooked with everyone else's then you may as well push income into the next, then you get better Q over Q comparisons. Lies, damn lies and accounting.

To: t_w_b who wrote (96078)	4/19/2001 9:33:23 AM
From: JHP	Respond to of 436258

Personal Capital: The backloading boom By Eric Moskowitz Red Herring April 12, 2001 Don't expect technology firms, especially software companies, to blow away their numbers in this first-quarter earnings season. "There's just no point," Broadbase Software (Nasdaq: BBSW) CEO Chuck Bay tells me. "Wall Street and investors aren't impressed, so companies are backloading contracts so they will have them ready for the third and fourth quarters." Software companies always backload (or backlog) contracts, but technology executives in other industries are now saying the same thing. "We're backloading as much as we can for the second half of the year," says the chief financial officer of a hardware company I recently spoke with. "Investors are kind of shell-shocked right now, so they kind of don't react -- whether our quarter misses or beats [analysts' earnings expectations]." The rationale actually makes a lot of sense in a saving-good-things-for-a rainy-day sort of way. Backloading key contracts will also help a company put up boffo third- or fourth-quarter results that could get momentum investors, who have been in hibernation all winter, excited again. Rich Frick, a partner at consulting giant Ernst & Young, says that this backloading concept may already be spreading into mergers and acquisitions. Of course, the M&A world hasn't come to a complete halt. Broadbase, as a matter of fact, agreed to merge with Kana Communications (Nasdaq: KANA) on Monday. But Mr. Frick says there really is little benefit for companies announcing deals this quarter, given the market environment. And he adds that many companies aren't in any sort of position right now to execute deals. All this backloading may be good news for investors in the second half of the year. But it could also be yet another misleading indicator for hemorrhaging technology investors to cling to. Sorry, but by backloading these deals in this environment, companies also are placing a big bet that they will hold up in the event of a continuing downturn. Stay with me here: if a company has a contract with a customer but doesn't officially put it on the books, the company is essentially taking a chance that the deal could evaporate between now and, let's say, September. What if the customer in question goes belly-up this summer? SOFTWARE BOOM? However, software companies may have an ace up their sleeve. While excessive inventory is still a huge problem for everyone from contract manufacturers to chip makers, "software companies like Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Veritas Software (Nasdaq: VRTS) emerge relatively unscathed by the inventory overhang issue," says Bob Rezaee, a senior technology analyst at Montgomery Asset Management. Although he believes Veritas is still a bit rich (it trades at 65 times 2001 earnings estimates) he likes Oracle and Vignette (Nasdaq: VIGN). I also like Vignette as a long-term holding. Vignette's stock has dropped from $70 to just over $4 in the past year, and the company recently hired Siebel Systems's (Nasdaq: SEBL) worldwide head of sales, Thomas Hogan, as chief operating officer. If you look at top technology companies -- EMC (NYSE: EMC) in storage and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) in networking, for example -- they all have, by far, best-of-breed sales teams. Mr. Hogan helped build Siebel's software sales force. "I bet you Hogan had a dozen offers to choose from, and he chose Vignette. That tells me something," says Mr. Rezaee, whose firm is long Vignette. THE PERSONAL CAPITAL WEEKLY LINES First off, thanks to the 40 readers who sent in events that they want me to make a book on. Although I can't get to them this week, rest assured we will be rolling them out in the weeks to come. Keep 'em coming. (Email me at eric.moskowitz@redherring.com.) The Disney (NYSE: DIS)-Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) rumor is getting a bit cold, so I decided to lower the odds to 10:1 from 5:1. But I'm already hearing from two sources that another round of banking layoffs is more of an eventuality than a rumor at this point. So, with the major banks getting ready to announce first-quarter earnings, I am installing the layoff rumor as this week's favorite at 9:5. I've also liked the action on the Nasdaq -- especially the late rally on what was a down day last Friday -- so I am increasing the odds of it hitting 2,500 again this year to 5:2 from 3:1.