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Technology Stocks : Broadcast.com (Acquired by Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SouthFloridaGuy who wrote (278)	11/27/1998 11:31:00 PM
From: chirodoc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1260

read this about bcst..... Tech Savvy: Three Easy Pieces: Watching the Smart Internet Stocks By Jim Seymour Special to TheStreet.com 11/27/98 3:37 PM ET Even during this short week on the Street, there were some lessons to be learned. In tech stocks, one of those lessons is that virtue is rewarded -- well-managed companies with good products are rewarded in the market, as well as in the marketplace. Whether that interests you depends a lot on whether you're a trader or an investor. (Though I confess I have an increasingly hard time separating the two. Is the time horizon -- always at the root of those definitions -- now really that much shorter for traders than for investors? Can even the longest-term investor feel safe not tracking daily fluctuations? What about hourly fluctuations? I dunno: Send me a note with your ideas.) Anyway, if you still have room on your dance card for companies that prosper the old-fashioned way, with growing sales and growing profits based on a growing product line and a growing customer base, this week offered Three Easy Pieces (with apologies to Bob Rafelson): three tech stocks that moved nicely in response to smart managers' good results. I think there's still money, including near-term money, to be made in them all: Novell (NOVL:Nasdaq) has been wandering in the woods for a long-time, but former Sun (SUNW:Nasdaq) exec Eric Schmidt has moved the networking software company from an ego trip to a business proposition. Especially with Microsoft's (MSFT:Nasdaq) Windows 2000 (nee NT 5.0, a.k.a. Late Again) slipping further behind, and getting mired even more deeply in the coming Y2K "unspending" cycle in corporate America, Netware 5 looks better and better to companies which have a lot of Netware servers installed, but had been looking towards a migration to Windows 2000. Why? Netware has been delivering global directory service, while Microsoft has been promising it. On Tuesday, Novell reported fiscal 1998 revenue of $1.08 billion and profits of 29 cents a share, up smartly from 1997's $1 billion and reversing the year-ago 22-cent loss. That despite a 39% drop in Asian sales -- itself, not bad this year for an enterprise software company. Novell closed down a little Tuesday at 17 and change, before the results were released, but on Friday closed at 17 15/16. More than 40% of Novell stock is held by institutions, which is encouraging. For a stock that has slid inexorably since dancing around 25 in 1994 -- arguably its last good year -- and is now up 70% from the recent October Badness, I'd say Novell's back in town. And likely to go further before the end of the year, and into 1999. Broadcast.com (BCST:Nasdaq) gave IPO investors an exciting ride up to the high 60s when it appeared in July, but wallowed down into the 30s soon enough. Since mid-October, Broadcast.com has climbed back up to close at 76 1/2 -- tacking on a 5 5/8 gain Friday. Broadcast.com now owns the audio-hosting market, is making the right moves in video over the Net and is quietly moving into conventional Web-hosting as well -- a logical move. I think Broadcast.com has more room to move upward between now and the end of the year. Intuit (INTU:Nasdaq), maker of the market-leading Quicken personal and small-business accounting software packages, got whacked early this week when it announced its about-as-expected quarterly results, but rallied at the end of the week. Intuit has always been a strongly seasonal business, with sales down in the summer and fall quarters, up during the end-of-the-year and tax-season periods. Intuit is flattening that cycle somewhat with its nascent online insurance and mortgage markets, but the seasonality remains. Intuit is now coming into the fat part of that cycle, and with growing revenues in those online marts, a booming personal-finance Web site, and especially its new online payroll service, looks headed for at least a couple of big quarters. Occurs to me there was another reminder this week of that maxim that virtue is, indeed, rewarded ... courtesy of Ricky Williams, great guy and stellar running back. Persistence counts.