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

To: Narotham Reddy who wrote (7175)	6/23/1998 4:00:00 PM
From: tonyt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

92 3/4 (up 11 3/8). This is unbelievable. 100 tomorrow easy. I'm gonna sleep on it, but I'm considering buying puts when it hits 99 1/2 under the theory that $100 will trigger a pullback.

To: Narotham Reddy who wrote (7175)	6/23/1998 4:06:00 PM
From: gbh	Respond to of 164684

From Briefing.com (earlier today) AMAZON.COM (AMZN) 86 1/8 +4 3/4: The universe's largest stock play keeps getting bigger. The stock price has doubled this month on virtually no news. After trading near 80 for awhile, the stock split. Naturally, with the price back down to 40, it had nowhere to go but back to 80. After all, when there are no earnings, multiples are meaningless. All that counts is the level of the stock price. Let's look at it from a different fundamental view, however - the total value of the company and the industry in terms of market capitalization. AMZN has 49.45 million share outstanding. At $86 a share, that makes AMZN worth $4.25 billion. Barnes & Noble (BKS 37 1/2 +2), which had 7.6 times as much revenue last quarter as AMZN, has a market capitalization of $2.56 billion. That means AMZN is worth 1.66 times BKS, Meanwhile, the country's second largest bookstore, Borders (BGP 36 1/4 +9/16) has a market cap of about $2.7 billion. Now, not only has AMZN created its market value from nothing in a couple of years, but BKS and BGP have also seen their market values nearly triple in the past couple of years. All this because there is a supposedly more efficient distribution channel, the Internet. However, economic theory and real-world common sense suggests that an efficient channel and competition will ultimately drive down the cost of the commodity sold (books). AMZN, BKS, and BGP may increase profits, but how much? This raises an interesting question: why would the market cap of the nation's major booksellers skyrocket from about $2 billion a couple of year ago to over $9 billion today? Are we all really going to read that many more books, and at what price?