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

To: OtherChap who wrote (14762)	8/27/1998 10:23:00 AM
From: IceShark	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

WrongWay OtherChap, I do not think is is now appropriate to compare AMZN to Cendant or get your hopes up that a Cendant-like hit would occur for that reason. AMZN has several areas where they push the envelope on GAAP and report results which are in fact misleading. However, everyone and their brother is doing it and no one seems to care, with the one lonely exception of the SEC. The public accounting firms, AICPA and "investors" sure as hell don't care. The AMZN accounting issues I think are important are employee stock options, potential one time write offs of goodwill on acquisitions to overstate future earnings and growth rates, calling operating expenses like marketing an extraordinary expense &/or non-operating expense. Then we have those outrageous "pro-forma" financial press releases that report EBITDA variant results to keep the smoke and mirrors going. But anyone with a couple of intro accounting and finance classes can see through that, if they want to see. However, if faced with these facts the bulls can simply fall back to some variant that AMZN is to commerce as MSFT is to PC software. So, if they are willing to pay up big bucks now, on the come, rationality doesn't matter. Regards, IS

To: OtherChap who wrote (14762)	8/27/1998 11:03:00 AM
From: Don Westermeyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

AMZN is 'creative', not 'illegal', and really nothing was hidden. The specific complaint about a lot of these companies is the use of 'one time' write offs for services that last years. The comment on CNBC was that AMZN was writing off advertising as a 'one time' expense. It's sort of like an airline writing off two years of jet fuel as a one time deal then claiming the savings in the future as profit. The internut stocks do this to play 'beat the earnings estimate' game.