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

To: OtherChap who wrote (25961)	11/13/1998 9:31:00 PM
From: BGR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Perhaps after that they will come back to YHOO, AOL and AMZN and bid up those instead?

To: OtherChap who wrote (25961)	11/13/1998 10:19:00 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

When history unveils itself. They will talk about the hype and the caution. N01, Hyper Business Week. You can't blame investors in Internet stocks for whooping it up. Once again, the euphoria over such Net darlings as Amazon.com, Yahoo!, and Excite is getting downright surreal. In the first 10 days of November, Internet stocks shot up 11.6%, according to the Goldman Sachs Internet stock index. That's more than double the 4.5% increase of the technology sector in general and seven times the performance of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index over the same period, which is up 1.5%. What gives? Can Web auctioneer eBay Inc., with $12.9 million in third-quarter revenue, really be worth nearly $5 billion--about 773 times expected 1999 earnings? And Yahoo! Inc., trading at 270 times forecast earnings--is it really worth three times the New York Times Co.? Bullish analysts certainly think so. They cite new studies that point to a huge rise in online business. Jupiter Communications, for example, predicted on Nov.2 that consumers would spend $2.3 billion online during the holidays, up from $1.1 billion last year. Another report, by Dell Computer Corp. and pollster Louis Harris & Associates Inc., says 43% of the Americans who use computers will be surfing the Web for Christmas gifts. Only 10% of such users did so last year. ''[The growth] is not only very real, it's also much bigger than people realize,'' says David K. Pecaut, senior vice-president at Boston Consulting Group Inc. in charge of the firm's electronic-commerce practice. JUICY DEALS. The holiday optimism comes on top of other rosy forecasts for the Internet sector. On Nov. 5, Forrester Research Inc. predicted global E-commerce revenue would reach $3.2 trillion by 2003, a figure that accounts for almost 5% of all global sales. Then there are the deals. On Nov. 11, Excite Inc. announced a multiyear pact with Banc One Corp. that could be worth more than $125 million. The nation's fifth-largest bank is paying the Web portal for the exclusive right to market its financial products and services to Excite's 17 million monthly users. Online music seller K-Tel International Inc. saw its shares nearly triple on news of a deal with Microsoft Corp. Some analysts do have misgivings about these valuations. Mitchell Bartlett of Dain Rauscher Wessels in Minneapolis has ''hold'' ratings on eBay and Amazon now. ''Overall, I don't get it,'' says Bartlett. ''These are fabulous companies. But at 100 times sales, it's hard to see any upside.'' Warns Paul Cook, co-manager of the Munder Net/Net Fund: ''Some of these companies are really going to get banged up.'' Don't tell that to the daredevil individual investors who are stirring up the market for Net shares, daily trading in and out of issues at a feverish rate. Some 14.5% of the publicly traded shares in Yahoo! change hands daily, compared with less than 1% for Microsoft, General Electric, or Merck. That means loads of profit while the good times roll. But should the bubble burst, these investors are likely to run for cover even faster than they ran to buy the stocks. By Linda Himelstein, with Robert D. Hof in San Mateo, Calif., and with Geoffrey Smith in Boston > There's another BW hype about Reel.com ready to take on Amazon.com on page 64. N02 bear. Then we have poor Barron's. Oc tells us they're going to do another negative on e-commerce. So far BW is winning hands down. Ps I played golf today with a 81 year old friend of mine who's a billionaire. I asked him, in his investing life, has he ever experienced a phenomenon, like these Internet stocks. He replied NEVER. So I asked him when it would stop. He replied, when they have every groceries clerks money. God bless America and f--k Morgan Stanley & the rest of the elephants.