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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (16286)	9/6/1998 2:19:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Jeez, Glen. Look again. It shows the $222,000 operating profit under 1997 (the bottom line of the first column). William, You are correct! Glenn open your eyes LOL:-) Glenn

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (16286)	9/6/1998 7:26:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

IPO VIEW - Market doldrums deepen IPO abyss Reuters Story - September 06, 1998 18:46 %BUS %US %TEL %IPO %ISU %STX TERN MXTR V%REUTER P%RTR By Stephanie Borise NEW YORK, Sept 6 (Reuters) - As Americans buried their heads in the sand over the holiday weekend in observance of Labor Day, analysts and portfolio managers joined them while reluctantly pondering the abyss that has become the market for new stock issues. "My facetious answer is, 'What IPOs?'" said Claudia Mott, syndicate manager at Prudential Securities, when asked about the outlook for new issues. "The IPO market has dried up," added Reena Aggarwal, associate professor of finance at Georgetown University school of business, who tracks IPOs. U.S. stocks finished a nail-biting week with only moderate losses on Friday, down about 42 points at 7640. But that was at the end of an explosive period in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock market's main health barometer, lost around 1,000 points over the past two weeks. With even the usually sturdy blue chips taking a hit, IPOs have become the last thing investors want to talk about, resulting in a bare calendar over the past two weeks as money managers shy away from any risk. The Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks managed to eke out a 0.78 point gain to 347 on Friday. But the Russell had its second worst month in history, noted Mott, who follows small cap issues. "And on a trailing 12-month basis, this is the worst comparison versus the S&P in Russell's almost 20-year history." The last time trailing returns were so poor? "You can find them in and around the Depression and the 1973 recession," she said. IPO pundits have long been saying that new issues are overpriced and the broader market's doldrums may finally be the catalyst that raises the bar for companies to go public. "People are just not going to have a lot of patience for some of these smaller companies," said Mott. By historical measures, the outlook for IPOs among the grimmest ever. Georgetown's Aggarwal said that very few IPOs took place during the two months after the market's crash on October 19 and 20, 1987. But the situation then and now is different in that today, the drop in the Dow has lasted more than two days and the events surrounding the drop are global. "What part of the world is left?" she asked. "We've already seen the financial services response," referring to large U.S. banking institutions, which have billions of dollars at risk in Russia and Latin America, coming forward with loss projections from their exposure in those regions. "Trading is only one area," she said. "But the IPO business is very high-margin and that's going to dry up." Still, some would buy new stocks in the current market. Jim Chen, part of a team of fund managers at $7 billion asset management firm Roger Engemann and Associates in Pasadena Calif., says he would still buy into IPOs if they were well-priced quality deals. But he adds those types of deals have been few. The last new stocks he bought were Terayon Communication Systems Inc. , which priced at $13 at August 18, and Maxtor Corp. , a maker of disk drive storage products for desktop computers that went public for $7 a share at the end of July. Terayon closed Friday at $7.50. Maxtor closed at $7.375. "Part of the reason we got involved in Maxtor was because the valuation was so ridiculously low that it was worth the risk," he said Chen said companies without brand-name appeal should, rather than attempt an offering it cannot sustain, create attractively priced deals to get themselves into the public arena and then have a secondary offering when the time is right. "But don't try to get greedy today," he said. "Prove yourself, and let investors see how you perform."