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Technology Stocks : (LVLT) - Level 3 Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2878)	6/19/2001 3:46:26 PM
From: All Mtn Ski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3873

Raymond, Good to hear from you as well! Toxic waste? More like flies on shit! <bg> I went long at $5.05, with a stop loss just under $5. I've been in cash for too long, so I guess I just got bored and had to try and trade something. <g> I'm just going for a quick trade, I don't plan on staying on to see if Crowe pulls this off or not. Frankly, with a market cap of $2B and debt of $8B, I think it will be hard to pull off. With that much debt, it is assured that common stockholders will get nothing on a possible sale/liquidation. However, I think I will get at least 10%-15% out of this trade. The powers that be are sure killing the retail guy, I think that NAZ is going to fall back and test its April lows, and the SOX is going to 500, if not under. The DOW is in for some pain as well, it won't be a pleasant summer for the Longs, IMHO. Staying safe out there Ray? Cheers, Tom

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (2878)	6/20/2001 9:32:18 AM
From: JMD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3873

Hi Raymond, long time no habla. Take a peek at something I penned for the MFNX thread. It got virtually no response there, so I'm either wandering in the telecom desert again or writing to a shell shocked audience. Like to hear if you think there's anything valid here: SB--absolutely agree that the potential for the debt load crushing MFNX, LVLT, and many others in this space, is one of the major concerns. Analagous to poker players who lose their stake and get flushed from the game, eliminating any chance of seeing the fruits of a winning hand. Quantifying this risk is crucial to evaluating potential investments. [I have no position in any segment of the telecom industry.] That said, I'm wondering if folks are overlooking a little tidbit from the Wall Street Journal article that was otherwise so devastating. Specifically, the WSJ pointed out that intercity connections were 'the easy part', but that this industry had completely underestimated the difficulty and expense of 'the last mile'. But instead of pondering the implications of that statement, the article merrily continues along with the now all-too-familiar 'glut of fiber' theme--only 2% lit, internet usage not as robust as predicted, etc. Well that seems to me to be a total disconnect, literally and figuratively. For a communication system to deliver value, it has to connect senders and receivers and until that connection is made, it is worthless. It is beyond debate that we don't have homes and offices outfitted with high bandwidth connections to the web to any significant degree. Home users report nothing but nightmarish stories about the delay, difficulty, expense, and unreliability of DSL, cable modem, satellite, wireless 3G--pick your pipe and I guarantee you it's broken, leaking, or just plain not available in any form. I'm in charge of getting bandwidth for our satellite offices and other remote users and can report that while the situation is better than at the residential level, it is not even remotely close to being adequate, never mind 'good'. We've been waiting over a month for a DSL connection in downtown Denver (this following a first attempt which knocked out regular phone service but failed to provide DSL.) So now the Journal reports that there's a dearth of data flowing over all those fiber optic strands in the ground? Pardon me, but, duh? Of course there isn't--there isn't any network over which to send it. I guess I'm saying we don't know what the ultimate demand for bandwidth is, and won't, until everybody's hooked up. Remote application hosting, video on demand, heck, just large file transfer capability, there is certainly more potential demand than what we can measure based on today's utilization. Now, it may be that even with everybody and their brother on the web sending and receiving like madmen, that there is indeed a surplus of fiber. My point is simply that extrapolating potential demand from today's utilization is an entirely fallacious approach to answering this side of the supply/demand equation. I repeat that I have no position, long or short, in this segment but the reason has nothing to do with articles like yesterday's. First, one has to answer the 'too much debt' question, then one has to estimate whether or not these guys can make a buck selling the bandwidth they've put in place. At least to this point, I don't have answers to either and will avoid telecom until I've schnookered myself into believing that I do. I didn't find either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal articles helpful in that regard, though the Level 3 and Qwest war stories were kind of amusing. Regards, mike doyle