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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (27070)	1/7/2003 7:50:01 PM
From: LPS5	Respond to of 74559

First of all, over time well over 95% of all IPOs lose money for those who didn't get in on the initial insider deals. Got any documentation to support that assertion? LPS5

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (27070)	1/7/2003 9:47:46 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Ray, I won't resile from my desire for virtue. For a few decades, virtue was confused with prudery, intolerance, stuckupedness and other unvirtuous attitudes. Virtue became a joke, an embarrassment, a naive klutziness - meat for the "realist's" meal. Even the televangelists, who cynically promoted virtue to a few gullible and wishful adherents were as bad as the corporate crooks. Virtue did seem anachronistic. You are quite right that virtue is lacking. My point was just that the USA is not all bad. Okay, an overall average does indeed hide the fact that the national anthem of the USA is, to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, "I owe, I owe. It's off to work we go" as they head off to the mine each day. It's their choice. They aren't like mindless cows in a paddock, kept for milking and herded here and there to the next grazing, though some would see some similarities. <I remain, as always, very curious as to the reasons for your pollyannish faith in the future of high tech investing, the managements that have created so much misery..... and chaos that is the fate of the John Q. Public type investor. > Ever since I can remember, I've liked the idea of science, technology and progress. While the management who run the companies developing the future aren't all good, neither are they all bad. Over the centuries, the stock market has returned something like 8% to shareholders. So the market is not merely a means to transfer investors' money to management. Though one must keep a close eye on management because temptation, greed and human nature are a never-ending story. It's pretty good when one can associate with virtuous people in virtuous spirals of creativity. When that's not available, mutual self-interest is not all bad as a substitute. The skepticism I lacked on Globalstar was indeed fatal to the dollars I allocated there. The specific failure I had was to think that when their marketing plans failed, as I had been predicting for a couple of years, they would adjust their plans by lowering the minute prices to a level which would succeed in attracting swarms of subscribers. So I thought I'd just hold the shares as they went through the trough before adopting the right pricing strategy. They never did lower their prices [other than a smidgeon]. It remains bewildering to me as to why they didn't cut their prices and preferred to go to the wall. Bernie Schwartz definitely did not want that and it cost him a lot of money. He was strung along by Vodafone and the telecom service providers who have a pricing mentality from which they couldn't step away. Geoff Goodfellow says it was a metaphysical certitude that they would not change their plans. I knew there would be intense resistance, because I had taken the time and spent thousands of dollars to travel to San Jose, Geneva and Australia to check out them and what they were doing. They were indeed obtuse, so I was well-warned that they would not lightly change their minds. But when people are confronted with disaster, one would expect them to eventually take the only steps which can be taken. Nope! The fallback position from that was that some other company would see the opportunity, recapitalize the company sufficiently to take it through and do the job right. Still nope! Bernie Schwartz called the market failure by the service providers criminal. Well, I remain suspicious that it was in some way Machiavellian, but from what I saw in my discussions with the people, simple stupidity and obtuseness is probably sufficient to explain the situation. Nevertheless, mostly out of curiosity rather than expectation of any financial reward, I joined a class action suit as lead plantiff against Bernie and Loral because I thought that for not much cost, we could all trot along to court, have all the gizzards exposed and see if in fact everyone was above board and merely stupid. Stupidity is quite legal. Let's face it, that's the most common human talent, so it can't really be illegal. The courts are full of it too. Clever new technology is what delivers large consumer surpluses to people and large consumer surpluses with a patented monopoly lead to large profits. That's why I like high tech investment. It's also challenging and interesting [more so than real estate or more prosaic investments]. It also does the greatest good for the greatest number, so I like that aspect of high tech. Negligible resources are consumed. It's great for a crowded world. The class action suit seems to be going nowhere fast. I think the lawyers were being opportunistic with little foundation - my own view was there was stupidity and wishful thinking. But the "on plan" refrain could have been a cynical lie to keep we investors strung along. Perhaps Loral and Vodafone were in cahoots to steal the system from the shareholders by running it into the ground and getting the assets on the cheap. That would fit the facts too. I'm curious about the failure mode. Maybe it's not as simple as it seems. It should not have failed [despite the ignorant comments people make]. When a thing should not fail, I wonder why it did if the reason isn't clear. Mqurice

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (27070)	1/7/2003 10:47:25 PM
From: portage	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Expensing stock options and making Boards of Directors independent of the top executives are the most important needed structural reforms. If they stop giving so many shares to the executives and employees, maybe the Boards could represent the real owners. Use the options sparingly as an earned bonus, not as a Ponzi windfall. Then stop the thieves' in the white house's next move to drain a portion of J6Ps social security contributions into the coffers of Wall Street's commission hungry swindlers. Another 50% drop waiting to happen, after that bubble bursts. Bring back the threat of lawsuits for securities fraud too, and make hard jail time a likelihood for the white collar bamboozelers. And why not reinstate Glass-Steagall while we're at it. Whoa ! Just woke up and noticed shrub's still playing at being president. Guess that was just a dream. Meanwhile, I heard about Trent Lott's edict that no lobbyists were allowed in his office if they had contributed anything at all to opposition parties. As he said, that's just the way your government "does business".