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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PAL who wrote (9228)	4/7/1998 6:25:00 PM
From: PAL	Respond to of 27307

Money.com speaks to tech stock guru Michael Murphy MONEY.COM: What's your view of Internet companies -- the Yahoos (NASDAQ:YHOO), the ETrades (NASDAQ:EGRP), the DoubleClicks (NASDAQ:DCLK) of the world? MURPHY: Well, there are some huge winners in there, and it's way early to figure out which ones they are. You can do two things. Either take the attitude that you're going to try to play the game -- because right now it's primarily a game of guessing which one will do well. And these are very volatile stocks, which can run up or get cut in half in an eye blink.* So you can buy several of them and hope that the better one -- say that Yahoo ultimately wins or Excite ultimately wins -- whoever it is that ultimately wins, your profits on that one would make up for your smaller profits or losses on the others. Or you can wait until the sector matures more and then come in. And I think for most individuals, waiting is a good idea. The business models for these companies haven't even stabilized. We don't even know if advertising will support a company on the Internet. Who knows? MONEY.COM: And the current valuations of Internet companies are ... MURPHY: Oh, the valuations are totally out of line. In fact, I've talked to most Internet Wall Street analysts -- they're aren't that many of them -- in the last few months, and they don't have many recommendations. Because, historically, 45 times prospective earnings is about as much value as you can maintain on this kind of a stock. And even if you go out two or three years from now, they're still at more than 45 times those earnings. So they've become trading sardines, as we call them. You know, people are playing with them. The hot money guys are leaping in because the stocks are going up. There'll probably be a pretty nasty correction in here at some point. Perhaps triggered by one of these companies, either running out of money or trying a subscription model and discovering that nobody subscribes.

To: PAL who wrote (9228)	4/7/1998 10:08:00 PM
From: Tom Hua	Respond to of 27307

Another good candidate for shorting is Preview Travel (PTVL). Their marketing expense (something like $ 5M payable to AOL) is much higher than their revenues, and the only thing they can stay afloat is to issue more stocks. PAL, PTVL is obligated to pay AOL and XCIT $56 M over the next 5 years, $4.5 M to Lycos over 2 years. On Monday Powerlunch, Bob Parsiani singled out PTVL as an example of internet companies that rely on the public to bail them out. He also pointed out that of the 3 MM shares secondary offering to come later this month, 1.5 MM are sold by insiders. The public not only bails out the companies, it's making a few individuals very very rich. Regards, Tom