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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Investor-ex! who wrote (7928)	2/15/1998 10:08:00 PM
From: Investor-ex!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13594

An observation, I'm amazed (though less than I have been in the past) for what passes as financial journalism these days. On my way home from work Friday, I was listening to National Public Radio's finance program, "Market Place", I think it's called. I like this program -- usually long on fact and short on hype. Each Friday, they have a guest stockbroker, David Johnson, who works someplace in Dallas. I like to hear his comments because they are usually a good proxy for market sentiment or, at the very least, one can gain a feel for the line that the retail brokers are feeding their clients. So, he comments about how nice a week Wall Street had and then, to my amazement, starts talking up AOL. But get this, he characterized AOL's latest earnings as stellar (even though 1/4 to 1/4 EPS was up a paltry 6 1/4% and that coming off of what should have been a very strong 1/4) and then he said that for the 1/4, AOL "added something like 11 million new accounts!" -- on NATIONAL radio!!! I don't know quite what to make of this. Is this man a dunderhead? Is he that sloppy? Is he pumping this thing? Distressing and scary... ___________________________________________________________________ On related topic, I think AOL would very much like to do a 3 for 1 split. I also think that they would like their stock to be at least 50 after the split, hence the arbitrary price target of $150 we hear being bandied about. It seems lately that every newly announced price "target" is quickly taken out in a few weeks. This time might be different, but it's getting ever more difficult to see anything that will bring this thing back to a reasonable valuation. Logic just doesn't SEEM to apply, though I'm currently putting together a list of reasons to help explain why.