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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Olu Emuleomo who wrote (133660)	10/26/2001 2:20:49 PM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 164684

yes they are looking good to short!

To: Olu Emuleomo who wrote (133660)	10/26/2001 4:21:54 PM
From: Olu Emuleomo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Excerpt form the Motley Fool Investors are simply a subset of the general populace. They want good stories, too. They will spend way more time paying attention to a dicey stock, one that might blow through the roof or flame out in a blaze of glory, than the steady, predictable, decent companies that don't make headlines. And analysts and commentators are more than happy to oblige them. This was, of course, one of the drivers behind the bubble of 1999. People with money heard stories and chased them with dollars. B2C, B2B, P2P, 3G -- you name it -- attracted attention from the would-be gurus at Gartner Group and Forrester Research and Jupiter Communications and anyone else willing to slap outlandish predictions on a dream. AMR Research actually told us that B2B transactions would reach $5.7 trillion in 2004 -- about equal to the U.S. gross domestic product in 1984, adjusted for inflation. Not if capital spending at businesses shuts off like a television thrown into a lake, it won't. Yet these companies made millions of dollars selling these guesses to people who wanted to believe them. Then there are the analysts. Henry Blodget, then languishing at CIBC Oppenheimer, set the tone in late 1998 when he said that Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), then at $275, would go to $400. It did, and Blodget got a sweet job at Merrill Lynch, one of Wall Street's most premier firms, along with a huge raise. Many followed suit, culminating in Walter Piecyk's $1000 price target on Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM), then at $500. That one didn't work out, and Piecyk stayed at PaineWebber. Don't think that it's over now that the bubble is deflating, either. The madness continues. Just last quarter, an up-and-coming research firm called Compete tried to put itself on the map by asserting that Amazon would bring in $700 million in revenue in the third quarter, significantly above expectations of about $650 million. In a low-gross-margin business like Amazon's, that's a big difference in results. The call caused quite a stir, coming shortly after September 11th, which was widely believed to have put the big hurt on retail. It also came shortly after the infamous bull Blodget lowered his sales target to $638 million from $660 million. Compete, however, swore that its data was strong. Amazon's stock shot up from $7.26 to $7.90, and proceeded up to $9.50 before earnings came out. "We are crossing our fingers on this one," a Compete spokesman said at the time. Yeah, it sure would have been nice if it had been right. As it turned out, everything was as it seemed: Amazon reported $639 million in revenue, as Jeff Fischer reported on Wednesday. Blodget, now chastened into making below-average estimates, got it right. The stock plummeted back down to pre-Compete levels. My question is not why Compete would do it. That's obvious; if they had been right, they could have started charging big bucks for their research. Most people will probably forget that they got it wrong. My question is: Why do investors play this game? Why do more shares of Amazon trade every day than, say, Linear Technologies (Nasdaq: LLTC), a company that doesn't do acquisitions or one-time charges or fancy convertible bond offerings or the like, but just does its job and earns incredible returns? Why do people want to read about and trade on Enron's (NYSE: ENE) fiscal shenanigans rather than DTE Energy's (NYSE: DTE) innovative growth strategy and 5% dividend yield?