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Strategies & Market Trends : Paint The Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AugustWest who wrote (2018)	11/15/2001 8:45:37 AM
From: AugustWest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23786

Internet bull Blodget to leave Merrill Lynch (UPDATE: adds additional details, background) By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent LONDON, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Merrill Lynch (NYSE:MER - news) Internet analyst Henry Blodget, who rose to fame during the dot-com boom and has become a target of criticism during the bust, will resign at the end of the year, the company said on Thursday. Blodget's first taste of fame came as an analyst at CIBC Oppenheimer where he predicted shares of online retailer Amazon.com Inc. would hit $400. The stock had been trading at $240 at the time of the call. It closed Wednesday at $9.49 on the Nasdaq. Amazon surged past the $400 mark in a matter of weeks, not months, making Blodget a hero to American investors. The bold prediction also caught the attention of top Wall Street firm, Merrill Lynch, which hired him in early 1999, replacing its own Internet bear, Jonathan Cohen. ``Henry is going to take a voluntary separation package,'' London-based Merrill Lynch spokeswoman Pam Snook told Reuters. The New York Times reported the severance package was estimated to be worth $2 million. Snook could neither confirm nor deny this figure. Merrill has offered severance packages to its 65,900 employees worldwide as part of a broad retrenchment amid an industry-wide slowdown. Staff at Merrill were braced for a wave of layoffs as industry sources have said the company's voluntary buyout package had not attracted enough candidates. The firm, the No. 1 U.S. brokerage, has said it has no company-wide reduction targets. At the industry's peak throughout 1999 and 2000, Blodget issued a barrage of positive reports that sought to shed light on the rise of U.S. dot-com start-ups, including Yahoo Inc (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news), Priceline Inc (NasdaqNM:PCLN - news), and DoubleClick Inc (NasdaqNM:DCLK - news), on the technology-laden Nasdaq. During his three-year-stint at Merrill Lynch, the indefatigable Blodget was regarded as the sector's biggest champion. He had been ranked the top Internet analyst in Institutional Investor's survey, but fell to No. 3 this year. While Blodget had predicted that more than 75 percent of dot-coms would fail, investors remembered him more for his bullish calls. As the bubble burst in the spring of 2000, Blodget and fellow top Internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley quickly came under investor fire. Several investment firms have changed their policies to alleviate concerns about the opinions put forth by analysts. Merrill Lynch, the number one U.S. brokerage, surprised the legal profession earlier this year when it paid out $400,000 to settle allegations that overly bullish research from Blodget caused a New York pediatrician to lose $500,000 earmarked for his daughter's college tuition. Random House is planning on publishing a book by Blodget due out next year about the dot-com phenomenon. Blodget was not immediately available for comment.