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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (130302)	8/19/2001 10:54:08 PM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

>From the article; how do we know that? We never will. But, to give Meeker credit, she told us a few years ago only a few I-nets will survive. Btw The only problem I ever had with Meeker/Bodgett/Kiggen etc was their hyped price targets. Now, we have a level playing field, and they've accepted it let them say what they want to say. >BY GRETCHEN MORGENSON New York Times NEW YORK -- Last Dec. 5, Andrew J. Neff, a computer analyst at Bear, Stearns, issued a report extolling the virtues of Palm, the handheld computer maker. After meeting with Palm's management, Neff had come away a believer in the company's future and its battered shares. With the stock near $44, Palm was well below its March 2000 peak of $165, reached on its first day of trading. He put a 12-month price target of $80 on the shares, reflecting his belief that they would trade at 19 times his 2001 sales estimate for the company. By the next week, Palm shares had climbed to $56.63. But then they began to sink, until, on Jan. 3, they had reached $27.88. That day, Neff cut his target to a range of $37 to $48. Two months later, with Palm in the mid-teens, Neff lowered his target again. Finally, on May 17, the shares stood at $7.05 when he slashed his target to around $5. It closed Friday at $5.36. Neff was by no means alone on Wall Street in his misplaced optimism regarding Palm. But his remarkable and almost certainly unreachable target of $80 for Palm shares does exemplify one of the most deplorable practices found among analysts during the stock market mania: the assignment of target prices that were based more on fantasy than reality. ``Those price targets were the equivalent of snake oil being sold off the back of covered wagons in the Wild West,'' said Stefan D. Abrams, chief investment officer for asset allocation at the Trust Company of the West in New York. ``The mere fact that you could not defend them by any rational means is evidence that these were nothing more than sales hype.'' Yet while money managers like Abrams recognized price targets for what they were -- and laughed them off -- many individuals bought stocks at least in part on their promise. Now they are sorry. Early in the mania investors who bought stocks based on wild targets did well. Amazon.com blew through Henry Blodget's famous $400 target about a month after he assigned it in December 1998. Because analysts kept raising their price targets as the stocks neared them, investors were emboldened to stay at the party even after the band had gone home. Rather than advising investors to sell overpriced stocks, analysts, with their escalating price targets, kept investors in the shares long after they had begun to fall. Neff said his early optimism about Palm was based on a less rigorous methodology than he applied to the stock later. But he said that ``it doesn't make intellectual sense to have an investment rating unless you have some sort of price target in mind.'' RiskMetrics, a software analytics company based in New York that specializes in risk assessment for the financial community, recently conducted a study for The New York Times that examined 550 price targets assigned to some 300 technology stocks as of June 22. It looked at five major Wall Street firms' targets for companies in computer software, hardware and semiconductors, and calculated the probabilities that these targets would be met within the next 12 months. The firms are Goldman, Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Prudential Securities and the Salomon Smith Barney unit of Citigroup. Fewer than 1 percent of the price targets in the study were below the stocks' levels as of July 24. While many of the targets had a better than 50-50 probability of being met based on past price action, 46 companies carried targets that had less than a 20 percent chance of being hit. Individual investors should do as their institutional brethren do and pay no heed to price targets.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (130302)	8/19/2001 11:18:50 PM
From: schrodingers_cat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>...Meeker really believed in the Internet... I think the only thing Meeker really believed in was advancing her own career...she saw that people were looking for gurus who would tell them what they wanted to hear...so she cashed in and told them all the sweet little lies they wanted to believe... The internet is gonna make you all rich... its all for real... its a new economy man!... forget profits, just follow the eyeballs... quit your job and buy a dot com and in six months you'll be buying your own island... just like the tow truck driver did... Now Meeker and her ilk deserve everything that's coming their way, but don't forget that she gave people what they wanted : an excuse to listen to their greed and jump into the mania. And don't forget that anybody that was dumb enough to follow the advice of people like her has no business trading common stocks. It's not like anybody paid her for good advice. I don't know why people expect the analysts to give them good advice. They just work for the folks who pay them, and that ain't the small investor. It's a free country, which means that people are free to do dumb things with their money...but the price of that freedom is that they don't get a refund when they lose their money...otherwise someone will have to take their freedom away.