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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Tokyo Joe's Cafe / Societe Anonyme/No Pennies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (1227)	7/30/1998 3:22:00 PM
From: DebtBomb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 119973

check this out... from thestreet.com:* We are in the "who cares" mode right now, which is a few sessions before the "get me out at any price" mode. As in "who cares" about that blowout quarter for General Instrument (GIC:NYSE)? Or "who cares" that Merck (MRK:NYSE) has announced a giant buyback and a boost in the dividend? Heck, who cares that GTE (GTE:NYSE) and Bell Atlantic (BEL:NYSE) are getting together? I know that when the market is in this mode, it very disconcerting. It takes people by surprise, as there are a ton of investors who are still too upbeat. Let's take the General Instrument situation. Tuesday night Jeff Berkowitz, my partner, and I were working after the close when General Instrument reported a "blowout" number, way ahead of consensus. No matter how gloomy it gets, you still feel good about getting it right, and we felt good about General Instrument. The stock had closed at 26 and we figured it would return to its old high of 29. As euphoric as we were, we still decided to offer 5,000 shares at 28 in Instinet, the buyer-to-seller direct market that trades electronically. We were taken immediately. Hmmm, we thought. We are giving the darn thing away. We have genuine-upside-surprise-shorts-must-cover mode going here. Pull the offering. Wrong! The next morning we were jolted back to the reality of this market, which was that nobody cared that GIC was great. It was if the whole market were saying, "Heck, man, Lucent (LU:NYSE) blew the numbers away and nobody cared, like why should I buy the GIC?" You are talking brutal reasoning. And the stock closed the day unchanged. Three weeks ago we would have been high-fiving after seeing the stock go to 30. Instead we are sitting there thinking, "Now what? Do we hope for a big set-top box contract? Do we bet the market comes to its senses?" It gets worse. I am reading the release from one of my small S&L holdings. Best quarter ever. Growth prospects unbounded. Lots of cash. No bad loans. Growth market. And what's the stock doing? It's unch. So I call my contact and I ask him if I am missing something. Did I read the release wrong? Was he more cautious than the release led me to believe? "Not at all," was the answer. "It was a great quarter, but no one cares." There's that phrase again. Later after the close, I meet someone who is angry that I mentioned on CNBC that Peoplesoft (PSFT:Nasdaq) is the kind of high-multiple stock that scares me here. The stock closed down a couple for the day. She started telling me about all of the great things PSFT is up to, how it's expanding and how it's now cheap, having come down 20 points from its high. "But no one cares," I interrupt. "Yeah, that's it," she chimes in. "No one cares." Okay, so what gets us out of this "no one cares" mode? Frankly, I wish I could be upbeat about the way we do get out of it. But I have seen the "no one cares" mode so many times in my career that I cannot sugarcoat it. When no one cares, somebody blinks. Somebody says, "Hey, what am I doing in this thing then if not for the upside surprise, or the great quarter, or the buying opportunity caused by a decline?" And that somebody sells. To someone else who thinks that someone may care, and when they don't, that guy sells. And so on. Trading desks get long merchandise and start choking on it. Traders get frustrated and flip out of it. Mutual fund managers, eager to lock in something, take profits and stop defending their positions. Until we reach a level where someone says, "I don't care if no one cares right now, I know there is great value here and I am holding." That level, by the way, is not that close to this level. It never is. I have rarely ever seen us enter this mode without exiting it in fear at lower levels. I can't imagine that this time it is different. It could happen; we are so oversold that we get some news that shakes us into caring at these prices. Right now. But the only action I have ever seen that has shocked us out of this mode to the upside is a Fed rate cut. I had thought that a prolonged, bitter GM (GM:NYSE) strike might lead to one. But that's not going to happen. So I am not holding my breath. ****