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Technology Stocks : WCOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dougjn who wrote (2931)	7/18/1998 2:04:00 AM
From: Jason Yantz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Idiotic post are just that, mindless interpretations of one's beliefs! However, by no means do i believe that just because a group of above average intellects whom congregate in a land of postings are any more right than those that visit per say PF LIVE or YAHOO! Overall I like SI, been a trial member a few times in the past oh, year and a half. It to me serves as just another entity of information from which people post there bewildered beliefs. I am for sure young and maybe a bit of a skeptic, but at the ripe age of 25 and having already built my portfolio to over 600 g's I feel that when it all comes down to it one must do their own research. Listening to all the hyped exuberance of net grandstanders will ultimately lead to one's downfall in stock picking! BY THE WAY GO WCOM! comments are welcomed!

To: dougjn who wrote (2931)	7/19/1998 2:52:00 PM
From: Jake0302	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Doug, I definitely see a big difference between SI and other message boards on the web. Thanks for your recommendations on other pay web sites. Might be worth it. As I am a trial member, I will try to say something witty, insightful, and cool so that I can win one of those free memberships. Actually, I picked up a recommendation on one of the other SI threads to consider WCOM calls, so I bought some Dec55s. Those are now in the money, and I am pretty close to doubling my money in a week. And I plan on letting those run into the Fall, as I expect US final approval of the merger, good earnings next Thus, and valid Internet hype to push this stock's price up quickly. I am playing with the target price of about 70 by around Nov 1. Anyone have any thoughts. I have been buying stocks in a systematic investment plan this year from the Money 30 list (www.money.com/money30) and, since June, from the Wired 40 list (stocks.wired.com). I feel that this gives me a good mix of large cap blue chips (HD, MSFT, CSCO are three big winners from the Money list, all up over 50% so far this year for me), and fast growth stocks (QWST, DELL, LU, AOL, YHOO are ones I have bought in the last few months from the Wired list, and they are shooting up nicely). Having invested for a few years, I am a bit more settled now, and I realize that I will make bigger gains by buying good stocks and holding them for years. So that is what I am looking at - a 15 year horizon in growth stocks. But I am still a young investor, and I would appreciate any advice about this overall strategy from anyone on this board. My favorite stocks right now (take note, SI Webmistress!), then are: WCOM QWST CSCO as Internet plays. WCOM's price has gone up, but not proportionally as much, as other Summer time 'net plays. And the company is under regulatory restriction on the forward looking statements that it can issue while the merger is pending (I'm pretty sure about this; someone else could probably add something here). So, with the final US approval, we should see a combination of more ambitious news, and exploitation of the tremendous opportunities in the Internet. QWST is just a great bandwidth solution right now, and there have been acquisition rumors aplenty. Check out wired.com for a good backgrounder on QWST. It has a second, empty, tube right next to the first tube of fiber, so it can DOUBLE, its already huge bandwidth at a minimal cost. Big tube, in a big way. And then there is CSCO, which will expand profits exponentially as long as nodes on the net are expanding exponentially; it dwarfs DELL's web site sales. Outside of those above, I really like HD GE Home Depot is expanding stores like no tomorrow, and they are raking the dough in. My position in HD is up over 65% for the year, and is my best performing equity, even alongside MSFT and CSCO (but I did get into these later). The thing is: HD isn't slowing down for the foreseeable future either. Moreover, it is probably a more steadily growing equity, which can complement or dampen the volatility in a tech stock portfolio. Moreover, HD is 'merican (hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet...); seriously, it is pretty well insulated from the Asian troubles. General Electric is pushing up through the mid 90s, and it is thus headed for historic split territory if it can get into the low 100s. Jack Welch continues to kick butt, though he is going in a few years. GE Capital is expanding. It is just a huge, solid, well run company. Moreover, it is buying up tons of businesses cheap in Asia, which, if you have a 2-3 year horizon at least, is a very good investment. GE's squared away management approach, local business networks; Asia will turn up. Anyway, those are my Sunday morning ramblings. Good luck to us all, and GO WCOM!

To: dougjn who wrote (2931)	7/20/1998 5:03:00 AM
From: ANANT	Respond to of 11568

Dougin and all: Excerpts from interesting WSJ article on WCOM interactive.wsj.com WorldCom's European Network Is Finally Ready to Carry Data Data By GAUTAM NAIK Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL LONDON -- Build it, and they will come. WorldCom will announce Monday that its 3,200-kilometer network linking London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Frankfurt is open for business. The network snakes into 4,000 office buildings across Europe, links with a new undersea cable, and then -- via WorldCom's nationwide U.S. operations -- connects to 27,000 office buildings on the other side of the Atlantic. "Now a business customer can have a video-phone on the desk of every executive in Chicago and Frankfurt," boasts Liam Strong, chief executive officer of WorldCom's International unit, during an interview in the company's frenetically busy offices in London. "We're breaking the mold." Tall Order Of course, WorldCom must first convince customers that its new network will actually deliver the goods. Up to now, so-called seamless networks have always sounded great on paper, but flopped in reality. Indeed, even WorldCom won't carry every call entirely over its network: In places where it hasn't built a local-phone network, it must still pass along the call to a regional carrier. That could erode some of its price advantage and introduce complexities into the system. And then there's the competition. Three smaller carriers, Esprit Telecom Group PLC, Viatel Inc. and Hermes Europe Railtel (the last is partly owned by financier George Soros), are racing to build their own pan-European networks. Like WorldCom, they no longer want to pay high fees to piggyback off the networks owned by British Telecommunications PLC, Deutsche Telekom AG and others. A fourth European player, Colt Telecom Group PLC, which is 62% owned by U.S. mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, is also building local networks in key European cities, and plans to link them eventually into a loose pan-European system. Even giant BT is assembling a Europe-wide fiber network by stitching together smaller networks owned by itself and various European partners. ----------------------------------------------- "The Internet has made bandwidth demand of the past completely obsolete," declares John Sidgmore, chief operating officer of WorldCom. "The networks of old simply aren't up to delivering what Internet users need." ------------------------------------------------------------ Deep Impact This shift will have an enormous impact on Western Europe's recently deregulated telecom industry, especially in the realm of cross-border transmissions. Such traffic accounts for roughly $21 billion in revenue each year and is expected to double over the next five years. Trouble is, this rich segment has long run according to an arcane and inefficient pricing system created by the world's older phone carriers. Its centerpiece: a cumbersome relay race in which international calls are handed from one phone carrier to another -- leading to high prices, questionable quality and complex billing problems. Consider a call from Chicago to Frankfurt under the old system: The call begins with Ameritech Corp., the local carrier in Chicago, which then hands off to AT&T Corp. or some other long-distance operator. AT&T carries the call to the East coast, passing it off to an undersea provider (which may not be AT&T). The call may emerge in Britain, be picked up by BT and finally dispatched via Belgacom SA of Belgium to Deutsche Telekom -- which makes the final connection to Frankfurt. There are six carriers involved and each charges a different fee. That's why calls over the same distance, but crossing different international boundaries, can vary in price by up to five times. WorldCom hopes to do away with all that. As of today, a call originating in one of the three 103 local-phone markets in the U.S. directly served by WorldCom can travel over the carrier's own long-distance network in the U.S. From there, it can cross the Atlantic via WorldCom's Gemini undersea cable and slip over WorldCom's European network to a phone in Frankfurt. WorldCom has spent $1.5 billion on European infrastructure in the last four years and its 3,200-kilometer fiber-optic system, dubbed Ulysses, already covers areas responsible for 65% of Europe's telecom traffic. But WorldCom isn't stopping there. It plans to stretch Ulysses to Milan, Zurich and some regions of France outside Paris. WorldCom's new European network is very fast and very powerful. A typical data line leased from BT, say, can dispatch data signals at a speed of two megabits -- equivalent to 40 pages of a 300-page book -- per second. WorldCom's network can send up to 14 of those books per second. WorldCom says it can also offer high-speed data service at prices 25% to 45% cheaper than those of BT and other dominant players in Europe. And because WorldCom controls every centimeter of its own network across Europe and the U.S., it can send customers consolidated bills and provide uniform customer services in both continents. -------------------------------------------------------------- Similar ideas are being hatched at the other challengers, which over the next two to three years could together spend $5 billion in constructing new telecom infrastructure across Europe. But each is pursuing a slightly different market: ESPRIT HERMES VIATEL: COLT: Thanks to new technology, many of these new telecom players can now boost capacity some 40 times "just by a flip of the wand," notes David Wheeler, telecom banker at Credit Suisse First Boston, in London. But that may well bring the industry full circle, he warns: "There's now nervousness creeping in, and the question is being raised: Are we going to see a glut?"