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

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (139147)	2/12/2002 11:32:19 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

"Positional" is not a very common term. It is from economics. It is value derived from demand and scarcity -- the value of a Harvard MBA would disappear if everybody could have one. The value of the best neighborhood in LA would collapse if everybody could live there -- which of course they can't. In the tech bubble the limited availability of 'new economy' shares created a temporary positional good -- new economy stocks. A couple of years of IPOs and the vast expansion of shares outstanding washed out the positional value of these stocks. You cannot put the Genie back in the bottle. These shares will never get anywhere close to their peak positional price because they now trade on their fundamentals and have no further positional value -- although you could easily make the case that they have not finished this process completely. Gold is positional to the extent that it is sought-after by investors but relatively slow to find and mine. You point to how small gold is -- that is precisely what makes it positional -- and nothing makes for a volatile price more than this one quality. Ironically, the same thing that made Yahoo go up will make gold go up -- despite a host of seeming differences.