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Microcap & Penny Stocks : FRANKLIN TELECOM (FTEL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: vic klimpl who wrote (36512)	7/22/1998 12:02:00 AM
From: Gary R. Owens	Respond to of 41046

3rd hand info, but ineresting: To: Roger A. Babb (11787 ) From: paul t Tuesday, Jul 21 1998 9:47AM ET Reply # of 11842 AT&T?? Interesting article I found on the WCOM thread. I wouldn't advise shorting WCOM just yet but AT&T?? Why not! WCOM replace AT&T on the Dow?? Wow!! To: ANANT (2940 ) From: Teddy Tuesday, Jul 21 1998 8:39AM ET Reply # of 2947 Here's a good article. It is from a pay site, but you can get two weeks free thestreet.com (Mr. Cramer, let me know if you object to my posting it here. I was going to just post snips, but it is such a good article I couldn't find anything to cut out. Intersting prediction at the end) Wrong! Rear Echelon Revelations: Ma Dumbbell By James J. Cramer 7/21/98 12:15 AM ET Of all the bonehead moves, I still can't get over this AT&T (T:NYSE) purchase of Tele-Communications (TCOMA:Nasdaq). This merger will go down as the dumbest of the decade, with the possible exception of Quaker Oats' (OAT:NYSE) incredibly stupid buy of Snapple, though at least Quaker was able to recover. I don't know if AT&T ever will. In the meantime, WorldCom (WCOM:Nasdaq) just keeps going higher and higher and higher. It is only a matter of time, I believe, before WorldCom passes AT&T as the world's largest phone company. (It would also not surprise me if WorldCom passes AT&T in market cap -- currently there's a $30 billion difference -- by the end of this decade.) And Lucent (LU:NYSE), an AT&T child, has already surpassed its parent in market capitalization in just a few short years. How could this be? How could T blow it like this? Simple. Everything AT&T does is dumb. It should never have spun off Lucent. That was Wrong! It should have kept Lucent and spun off long distance!! And, more important, it should have bought America Online (AOL:NYSE) when it had the chance. Its stock would already be at 80 if it had. Instead it bought old technology and now will have to spend -- are you ready? Drum roll, please -- at least $25 billion in cash just to get any use out of this murderous acquisition. AOL wouldn't have cost it an additional dime and AT&T would have gotten AOL's top executives, Steve Case and Bob Pittman, to boot. Tele-Communications' infrastructure will prove virtually worthless for the Internet, I believe. I know this is not conventional wisdom, but I think that by the time AT&T has spent all it needs to make TCI's system fast two-way, you will be accessing the Net some other, faster way. By the time this acquisition is done, AT&T will have to write it off, a la NCR. TCI has underinvested for years and years and years. Now AT&T will have to spend for years and years and years. And it doesn't have the money to do it and be competitive in a cutthroat long distance market. In the meantime, WorldCom, which was a little regional nobody a few years ago, is now perceived as the Net phone company for the world. By buying one of the major online companies, AT&T could have stayed in the game. But instead it has simply bought a series of addresses and rights of way. It could have bought a bunch of utilities and done the same. Now WorldCom has the head start and isn't wearing the TCI leg iron. What prompted this bout of mean-spirited second-guessing is that when AT&T talked with America Online about acquiring it, AOL was at 75. There was talk that the online king might take 150, but that AT&T wouldn't pay it. Instead it bought TCI. AT&T has since lost billions in share value. Now look at AOL. The $$$*&$ stock is at 136, above where it would have traded had AT&T offered stock for it instead of TCI. AT&T would have, at least by the market's judgment, stolen AOL!!!! Instead, it is stuck with TCI. And a bunch of moronic tracking stocks that nobody likes anyway, save the investment bankers who will issue them, and John Malone, the man who has shown nationwide disdain for both customers and shareholders for most of his adult life. The final indignity, I predict, is that T leaves the Dow Jones Industrial Average, courtesy of those impossible-to-track tracking stocks, and gets replaced by WorldCom, the first Nasdaq stock to crack the Dow. What a pathetic denouement