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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: - with a K who wrote (18704)	2/21/2004 1:19:29 PM
From: - with a K	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78505

Other recent changes stirred by desire to lock in profits, raise cash, nervousness of NASDAQ valuations, and other factors: Sold TYC for a 38% gain. Sold TVIN for 256% gain. Sold WM for 55% gain. Sold HELE for 54% gain. Sold GMST for 19% gain. Sold RRI for 48% gain. Sold OMNI, TCN, LENS, and GIFI all for small loss (LENS was biggest loss at 9.7%). Added to BEL. Up 8.42% YTD.

To: - with a K who wrote (18704)	4/18/2004 12:59:24 PM
From: - with a K	Respond to of 78505

Interesting story in NYT on Diller going after Cendant's Silverman. Cendant (CUC) trial starts tomorrow. Snip: Now Mr. Diller is on the offensive. He is taking aim at the heart of Mr. Silverman's domain: residential real estate. Having bought LendingTree.com and RealEstate.com, Mr. Diller's company, InterActiveCorp, has linked mortgage brokering on the Web with Internet real estate referrals, using commission discounts as a lure. No one has more at stake from real estate commissions than Cendant, which controls more than 25 percent of the brokerage business through its Century 21, Coldwell Banker and ERA franchises. It is a clash of two of the country's most energetic and creative deal makers, both now in their early 60's and running unconventional conglomerates from offices a block apart on West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They took very different paths to get to this fight over several of the same businesses. Mr. Diller, flamboyant and impulsive, is a college dropout and former Hollywood executive who was born and raised in California. He is using his experience in selling jewelry on television and concert tickets by phone to find a way to use the Web to sell hotels, houses and more. Mr. Silverman, more serious and disciplined, is an Ivy League-educated lawyer who was born in New York City. He built and must now defend a conglomerate that has become a master at finding new ways to wring cash from old businesses with established brand names like Avis and Howard Johnson. At stake, in addition to personal pride, are lucrative slices of a very large market. About $1.5 trillion worth of homes changed hands last year; each percentage point of market share that LendingTree can get is worth $150 million a year. .... "The real story of the Internet," Mr. Smith said, "is not how you displace the real estate broker, but how you displace classified advertising." That is much the same lesson learned by most of the other online real estate ventures. "Microsoft, Yahoo, everyone and their brother poured a lot of money into real estate," said Brad Inman, a longtime publisher of real estate trade news. "They come in starry-eyed and say these Realtors are idiots. They spend a lot of money. And they realize they can't unlock the role of the Realtor. So they get out." The Web has a role in real estate. Three-quarters of home buyers do turn to the Internet, studies show. But they look at listings and learn about neighborhoods. Then they turn to brokers to visit homes and negotiate their deals. Mr. Diller wants to build a business hooking up Web shoppers with brokers. .... "No amount of big thinking I have ever done prepared me for how big they think at IAC," Mr. Lebda said, referring to InterActiveCorp.