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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock leader who wrote (27256)	6/15/2002 3:20:26 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28311

stock leader, I'm doing fair-to-middlin'... Not great, but not an absolute disaster either... Held on too long to some "good" tech names (and I knew better than to do that), but then I've got some good offsets elsewhere. My main holding is Ross Stores (ROST), where I'm up over 400% (I think) on some shares (position bought over time). My main problem is in finding good places to stash cash right now. I'm a long term, buy-and-hold guy, preferring GAARP (growth at a reasonable price) stocks and decent value plays. Not much of value out there at the moment, and even less in the GAARP area. So, right now I'm looking at REITs and perhaps laddering some CDs. I'm not particularly enamored of bonds or bond funds at the moment. I'm also debating the purchase of some precious metals as a hedge (not mining stocks or gold funds, but the actual metal itself like coins and bars; gold, platinum and silver). Right now I'm of the mind that a widespread market collapse is a distinct possibility (if not inevitable), and I'm planning on going 100% cash (or cash equivalents) and metals (and maybe a high yielding REIT, if there's one out there without too much associated risk). INSP is in (imminent?)danger of being delisted, so that is why you're observing downward pressure on the stock price. financials i consider really great are ones where cash on hand well exceeds market cap and NO debt Don't forget to keep a close eye on the cash burn rate as well. During the bubble, there were many companies that had tons of cash and a low stock price, and they managed to burn through that cash at an alarming rate. i'm bullish in this market since certain valuations are so low I'm quite bearish actually. While it is true that valuations appear to be low, especially when contrasted to valuations that investors indiscriminately gave stocks during the bubble years, I find that the underlying company fundamentals have actually decayed extremely rapidly since FY2000/FY2001, and therefore anticipate a general market sell-off, perhaps as early as the second half of this year. Despite what Wall Street "gurus" will say on CNBC, I think that the telecom debt load will be the trigger for the next wave down, which in my opinion will be a big one (at least 25% and perhaps as high as 50% to the major indices). KJC

To: stock leader who wrote (27256)	6/15/2002 8:18:17 AM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28311

i'm bullish in this market since certain valuations are so low .... And I'm bearish because valuations are still so high. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're nowhere near the bottom. Not just INSP, but the market. The buyers in the market are on a very long hiatus and the well-known poster child for manipulative executive hype won't be high on anyone's list of desired purchases just because it's trading at CoH when the odds are looking good for a court stripping it of that cash and forcing it into bankruptcy. Kerry, you're right about potential buyers but I disagree with parts. The price tag would certainly be millions, but I have no idea how many millions. Though the money likely exists here among membership, there's no way anyone's going to get something like that organized, and people here are smart enough to know they'd never get their money back. Before anyone looks at me as a possible organizer, I'll say that as much as I'd like to be the guardian of this content (it's more important to me than anything else about it), I am not the "organizing kind". Although an idea did just occur to me since I'm set up with Verisign and PayPal and have already written the underlying software that could do much of the organizing for me, but I'm sure I'll dismiss that one just as soon as I get finished with this cup of coffee. <g> I and iHub would arguably be a potential candidate, but the only economically feasible way for that to happen would be to import SI's content into iHub so we could lose the baggage of lifetime subscriptions. And that would depend on whether or not it'd be legal (and challenged) to acquire the site without acquiring the subscription commitments even if the site itself is eventually shut down once the content is safely imported into what's a much more efficient delivery system. No reason to keep the message board part around after that. And for a site like iHub, there just isn't a large enough following that the potential subscription income could even make a dent in the cost, unless a substantial chunk of SI's subscribers became iHub subscribers. I would consider Yahoo a prime potential candidate. They could pick it up for a miniscule fraction of their current cash, and have such a huge established user base that they alone could benefit most from deploying it as their for-pay version of message boards. So many that they could shrug off the overhead of existing membership. And being a big corporation, likely have the quantity and kinds of programmers it'll take to change it. Lycos would also be an excellent candidate. And possibly AOL. So if the company ever announces intentions to sell SI, I'll definitely get backers (and the whole "SI Bob acquires SI" thing would make a few VCs' ears perk up) and be a bidder, but doubt very seriously I'd be the winning suitor. To me, Yahoo buying it makes too much sense.