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

To: Kevin Podsiadlik who wrote (3225)	8/12/1998 7:06:00 PM
From: P.T.Burnem	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11568

WCOM's beta must have doubled if not tripled over the past couple of month. Mea culpa. I meant volatility, not beta. Beta is widely used to measure the volatility of a mutual fund or stock's price relative to the general market. Standard & Poor's is dead wrong. If they were right, a stock that closely tracks SP500 - such as SPY - would have a beta of zero (near zero, since in real life SPY tracks SP500 futures as opposed to cash). However, since the beta is a correlation coefficient between a stock and SP500, SPY has the beta of one. Market Guide goes as far back as five years in calculating beta This explains why their numbers are next to useless.