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

To: Mark Fowler who wrote (29625)	12/11/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

What happened to TomD. Don't say he took his millions and left. From todays Wsj. It appears that Kleiner doesn't want Msft as a partner. <Similarly, Kevin Compton, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says "we would rather work with Microsoft on specific ventures than have them in the fund." Kleiner Perkins has made successful joint investments with Microsoft in the past; it has also bankrolled start-ups that have become intense rivals to the software giant.>.

To: Mark Fowler who wrote (29625)	12/11/1998 11:42:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Mark, Inkt Ceo on Cnbc. I copied this from TMF. <I can't get the answers I am looking for on the reasons why DMG is showing up as such an abnormally large holder of a stock like AMZN. So I will list a plaubile explanation, and anyone is free to shoot it down or not. Fidelity, BTW, only owns 800,000 shares of AMZN, and that seems to be the cutoff number for the civilized world in terms of their exposure to this stock on a rolling basis. So why does DMG suddenly go into the market and buy 7,000,000 shares ? If you look at the chart of the stock for the past six months, obviously the market was fairly weak toward the end of September. Curiously, AMZN was on one of its reality-defying mini-moves, going from 80 to 100. Now bear in mind that the market as a whole had clipped some of AMZN's wings in the previous couple months. My theory is that the short interest began to pile in to the stock toward the middle to latter parts of September. I am not even going to go to the tape, that is how certain I am that this is true. I recall the shorts scrambling to borrow shares on perceived wounded stocks that would crash famously when the market sank. Unfortunately for them, Greenspan still had some powder in his gun. The thought was that the DOW would get to 6,000, and high Beta stocks would be the better choices to short when heading south. The ONLY reason a retail stock with ballooning losses and worsening margins would defy the markets gravitational pull, in this case down, would be if certain institutions and market makers (which in many cases are one and the same) refused to lend any more shares, and in fact had built up a large amount of the stock themselves. DMG's OTC desk knows this stock better than anyone, and my theory is that they simply took advantage of the numbers, however they probably had to dive in (to the tune of 7,000,000 shares) more than they wanted before they could really turn the screws. How they would allocate ownership to the Asset Management side is not my area of expertise, however I doubt it would be hard. My bet is that next quarter, their held number of shares will be 2,000,000, unless the ownership position was part and parcel of the IPO. In which case I am wrong. However I will stand by my earlier assertion that this would not have been a normal, rational purchase by any fund manager. My bet is that it's the OTC desk and prop desk working together at DMG.>