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To: Kenya AA who wrote (37977)	12/1/1998 7:30:00 AM
From: Kenya AA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

From Greenberg's column this morning: Apple antics: An item here last week said that the latest monthly numbers from PC Data show that sales momentum at Apple Computer (AAPL:Nasdaq) is on the wane. That was followed by a story in Computer Retail Week that said Apple is planning to cut the price of its iMac to $999 (not something a company does if sales are strong). Apple's stock, in reaction, slipped 3 1/8 yesterday to 31 15/16. An Apple spokesman late yesterday told me that the price-cutting story was "rumor" and that the company's policy is not to comment on rumor. As usual, he did the same shtick on Today's Business. There he added how Ashok Kumar said that Gateway would miss it's quarter. His conclusion is that PC sales aren't as good as everyone thinks. Bob Sellers said that maybe GTW's problems are at the expense of DELL? Herb said he didn't think so and "if PC sales aren't that good, what's going to happen with all those chips that are piling up?" K

To: Kenya AA who wrote (37977)	12/1/1998 7:36:00 AM
From: Kenya AA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Cramer's column this morning: The market went down because it was due to go down. It had made an especially big move in the last few weeks, some of it on very light volume. Wrong! Rear Echelon Revelations: Why the Market Went Down By James J. Cramer 12/1/98 7:15 AM ET Must we always have a perfectly scripted reason why the market goes down? And must editors always insist on such a fiction? Take yesterday's down-200 shellacking. Three reasons I heard and read repeatedly for the selloff were 1. flight to quality, 2. worries about earnings and 3. overvaluation. All three are bogus. Let's take them one at a time. CNBC commentators mentioned several times that they saw a flight to quality in the markets because bonds went up and stocks went down. Man, is that stupid. We had a flight to Treasuries earlier this summer when it looked like all else was failing. Treasuries are liquid and they will pay the interest. But we had no such threat yesterday to the rest of the asset classes that would bring about a flight to quality. You first have to have massive fear that everything else could go kerflooey. That was not the case yesterday. In fact, the only market that seemed imperiled was Hong Kong, and I have long since given up trying to intuit the way that market works. Earnings woes? Give me a break. You get earnings woes when you have companies preannouncing that they can't meet posted estimates. But nobody preannounced yesterday. Judging by the reports of strong retail demand, the opposite should have been happening. People should have been raising estimates. The earnings-worries story smacks of the worst form of canned journalism and should be banished, so when there are some real preannouncements you can say "earnings woes" infected the market and still have some credibility. Finally, if valuation is the reason the market went down, we should never have rallied from Oct. 8 to begin with. Stocks were certainly conventionally overvalued at 7400. "Conventional" is the key. At various times markets go to wild overvaluation. Other times, because the alternatives are so bleak, stocks can power higher effortlessly. We have been conventionally overvalued since 1982. But if someone thinks EBay (EBAY:Nasdaq) is overvalued at 200, they probably thought it was overvalued at 175, 150 and 125. Heck, EBay shouldn't even be a public company yet by some people's standards. Surely overvaluation didn't wake up and startle otherwise calm, rational dollar's-worth-of-assets-for-50-cents investors yesterday. The market went down because it was due to go down. It had made an especially big move in the last few weeks, some of it on very light volume. The action in the Internet stocks was totally unsustainable. Margin requirement changes at brokerage houses for stocks that had been trading five and six times their shares outstanding EACH DAY caused there to be a glut of supply at very high prices with no speculative demand. The selling will continue if thinly margined speculators keep liquidating positions. It will stop when they are done. Those of us who would like the bull market to continue -- and I do want that to happen -- should be glad that these margin rules are changing. The action in the .com stocks was so full of froth as to make any reasonable person believe that the market had lost its mind. I wish there were more to it, but there isn't. Nevertheless, the market is not a "round up the usual suspects" business. Each time there are different subtleties to why it goes down and why it stops going down. None of the reasons I read in the boilerplate stories captured those nuances. Why does it matter? Because they fail to illuminate the root causes of the selling. Therefore they will obfuscate, not clarify. They will cause you to lose, not make, money. And making money is what it is all about.

To: Kenya AA who wrote (37977)	12/1/1998 7:46:00 AM
From: Kenya AA	Respond to of 97611

Eat this one Herb: From today's IBD . . . Household PC Penetration at 48.2% Nearly 50 million US households now have a PC, says a Ziff Davis study. Between January and August, 3.9 million households that hadn't previously had a PC acquired one. That jump in ownership comes close to matching the 4.7 million households added in all of '97 - and doesn't include the '98 Christmas season. PC ownership is highest among those households earning more than $75,00 a year. AND ... Apple Computer will lower the price of the 233MHz IMac to $999 from $1,299 in February when it unveils a faster model. The new one will sell for $1,299 reports say.