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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (15386)	11/22/1998 1:03:00 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27307

Dave, As you know from my earlier posts (and I just posted a long 3-parter on the YHOO thread if you want to hear more), I agree with you up to a point. However, all short-term traders in all stocks must pay attention to supply and demand factors as well as to fundamental factors. They must also be observant about which fundamental factors, in the short term, are likely to affect the stock. But in focusing on those things, they often miss a stock's transformation from a short-term trading vehicle into a long-term fundamental play. The real money necessary to propel a stock to the heights (much bigger than $20B market cap) comes from mutual funds and 401(k)'s. Those managers will not buy a stock based on short-term factors such as supply and demand; they are looking at where the company will be in five or ten years, because ultimately if the company tanks there is nothing that can save the stock. So those managers eventually begin to pay attention to mundane things like quarterly earnings and the like, and how they relate to the stock price. Yahoo has one thing in common with the tulips, Bre-X, and your other examples: its speculators are gripped at times by an unshakable belief in the company or at least its stock appreciation, and they therefore believe that there is no or limited downside. This gets expressed in a variety of ways, from the more juvenile statements on the YHOO thread to things like: fundamentals don't matter, you can't lose because the float is so low, a split will propel us still higher (even though, paradoxically, the split would affect the float in share-number though not percentage terms), China and India markets will mean incredible growth, etc. -- call it, as I believe Happy Girl did a few days ago, a mass hypnosis. One thing about mass hypnosis throughout history: it's always the hypnotists you have to watch out for. The hypnotized are only scary because of their willingness to be controlled and form a mob (and what does that say about the human condition?). Eventually, if the hypnotist says so, the hypnotized will stampede over a cliff like a bunch of wildebeasts. I, for one, prefer to stay awake. MAD DOG