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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (3159)	4/19/1998 8:23:00 PM
From: Candle stick	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

Barron's article entitled "Tulip Time", they once again annihilate AMZN and the rest of the internet sector...... Available here interactive.wsj.com from Barrons online, but you need a subscription, or from here messages.yahoo.com@m2.yahoo.com which is a link on the AMZN board on Yahoo!.....this is the first installment which reprints the entire article, but due to space constraints you have to go through the next five messages to read the whole article.... here is a good excerpt: "Michael Murphy, the newsletter writer and fund manager, has just crawled out onto a long limb. In big, bold type on the front page of the April issue of his monthly Overpriced Stock Service newsletter, there's a headline advising investors to -- you guessed it -- "Short The Internet." And he's talking about the sector's biggest names. Like Amazon.com.On-line book sales, he contends, will be "a cutthroat business with razor-thin margins." He's also short Lycos, which he believes will get crowded out by larger competitors. "If they were a division of a Silicon Valley company they would be shut down as an also-ran not worth investing in," he writes. "As a Massachusetts company they get a billion-dollar market capitalization." Also on his hit list:OnSale. While the on-line auction site continues to build revenues, he notes, losses have been accelerating. Murphy also advises shorting Infoseek, noting the company is "losing even more money per share than Lycos." He's short Excite, too. And in perhaps his boldest pronouncement, Murphy advises shorting Yahoo!. He contends advertising on Yahoo! doesn't accomplish very much. "Their effectiveness rate is near zero; that is, quality buyers are not being delivered to the advertisers," Murphy writes. "In a great media year like 1997 everyone makes money. Media budgets are high and there is cash to experiment with new outlets like the Internet. As the U.S. economy slows, advertising budgets get cut back and guess who gets cut first? You got it. Folks who cannot demonstrate cost-effective impact that sells products and services." The newsletter's list of "potential prey" includes an array of other Internet companies, including CDNow, Doubleclick, Go2Net, Network Solutions, Sportsline and VeriSign." It is worth noting that several fund managers this week were quoted as saying that they felt the internet sector was a "mania" and that there were no underlying fundamentals to support valuations.....among them were Laurence Aurianna, of Newberger Berman funds, and Ken Heebner, one of the best performing fund managers of the last 10 years.......;^)