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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (8580)	5/9/1998 1:27:00 AM
From: e. boolean	Respond to of 18691

Roger, Guess I didn't make it clear that I was including this article as an example of the lengths to which the internet bulls will go to convince themselves that the buying panic has been justified. Its reasoning is so complacent and absurd that it gave comfort to me as a bloodied, but unbowed, internet short. I've been short YHOO off and on since the beginning of the year and intend to hold on til the bitter end. I also have puts on AMZN, MSFT, and DELL (the latter two in leaps). The internet is obviously huge and here to stay but the companies that will make money off of it are not the ones that are being touted now as the "internet brands". The internet will increase efficiency. These companies could only make money off of exploiting inefficiency. Again, really enjoy your list. e. boolean

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (8580)	5/12/1998 8:40:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18691

Roger, I think there's a bit of truth on both sides. Certainly with a broker, there is some incentive to stay. The pain and paperwork of switching creates good reason not to move unless there is a truly compelling reason. The same is largely true of ISPs. However, the same is not true for online merchants, web-search engines and the like. The pain of switching is almost non-existant. And there's very little pain to "shopping around" and buying at the best price. That's why the search engines and the retailers are the best shorts around. They are in a low-margin business, with no barriers to entry and very little disincentive to moving elsewhere. Companies like E-Trade are more easily valued as fast-growing financial service companies. Of course, the analysis of E-Trade was seriously flawed in one respect: It failed to even consider the possibility that the market takes a nice 30% dive, the hype gets driven out, lots of the neophytes generating huge commissions on foolhardy day-trading schemes disappear, and E-Trade's customer base and commision income starts shrinking, rather than growing... They're shooting students in Indonesia today. Wonder how the bulls will put a positive spin on this latest development? mg