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Technology Stocks : Osicom(FIBR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grantcw who wrote (5837)	3/8/1998 2:37:00 AM
From: Afaq Sarwar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10479

Grant Cain, This was posted on AOL in response to the recent "announcement" by Barb to start shorting Osicom starting this Monday: <Subject: Barb's Short Position Date: Sat, Mar 7, 1998 11:59 AM EDT From: ALLEN102 Message-id: <19980307155900.KAA20014@ladder03.news.aol.com> Barb- This dilution is not a surprise. Nearly a year ago I pointed out the dilution potential of the preferred. I recall contacting the company, and finding out that they didn't want to say what the number diluted shares was. At that point I sold the stock. I got back in after the Barron's article came out. I certainly would not rely on the company's statement as to the number of diluted shares. They have always been either vague or wrong depending on the circumstance. I think we will have to wait until the 10-K comes out in order to read the footnotes to see how much is left of the convertible stock. The one nice thing about a lot of that preferred is that while the downside was terrible (it converted at the market price of the common), the up side is ok in as much as the potential dilution decreases as the stock goes up in price. I would not build a short position on the notion of potential dilution. That is an old issue. At one point I had calculated that the diluted number of shares was around 24-25 million. I don't see anything that would indicate that number is increasing anymore. Rather it is likely to decline a little with the stock price increase. I think the more troubling issues have to be the lack of revenue and earnings increases in the company's most recent quarter. There is no quantitative sign that momentum is building. One of the questions in the conference call was whether the company was seeing a monthly increase in sales from the beginning of the last quarter to the end of the last quarter. I believe the answer was essentially no. So the questions we keep asking ourselves are not yet getting answered in a quantitatively positive way. Yes we have a handful of new products with significant sales potential, goes the story, but, the sales cycle takes time. And yes while we are waiting for sales to happen you do or do not have to worry about whether the established networking companies are going to catch up. My bet is that there is something here for the shareholder. Certainly when you look at the company in terms of market value per share versus sales per share, the company would appear to have substantial upside value if momentum starts to build on the sales and earnings side. Of course the entire stock market could tank in the meantime, and so the yardsticks of relative value would get moved. You like short-term trading versus patient investing. So perhaps there will be some significant opportunities to go short, cover, go short, cover, before the long position wins out. The one thing you will need to always keep in mind on the short side is that the company has hired an investment bank to make something happen in the value of the stock. So something could be announced when you are not expecting it. The investment bank was hired in November or December, and so something should come out of this before four or five months have passed.> The only thing this post fails to recognize is that Barb is too smart to get caught with her short position when some major news is announced. Afaq Sarwar

To: Grantcw who wrote (5837)	3/8/1998 2:37:00 AM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 10479

Here is an article that describes the pros and cons of the different systems and describes actual implementations saxophone.agora.com Yawar Fadoo, vice president of systems with the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi Information Service Inc. (Jersey City, N.J.), is one of them. He uses General Signal's Optimux and cites the ability to choose any port to connect to any type of network. Sridhar Gopalaswami, manager of resource management with Barnett Bank North America Inc. (Jacksonville, Fla.), found that to be the case. He was running Escon from the mainframe at the bank's data center to a tape library at a remote site. With only two pairs of leased fiber available out of four (the other two were already being used for different services), the Escon apps were running out of bandwidth. At the time, there were only two WDM products to choose from: General Signal's Optimux and IBM's Muxmaster. [Kind of makes you wonder about FIBR's first to market claim] Gopalaswami chose the Optimux, mainly because of cost. "IBM does 10-to-1 channels-to-fiber, but we didn't need that level of multiplexing," he says. Because the Optimux offered four channels, he didn't have to buy the larger (and more expensive) system. Still, the Muxmaster is proving the right choice for an investment banking firm in New York that wants to future-proof its network (the firm wished to remain anonymous). Right now it's running OC3 LAN traffic among routers in three locations. But it has plans to add FDDI server-to-server backup and Escon traffic, something that the IBM mux, with its additional channels, can handle.