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

To: Mark Fowler who wrote (30547)	12/20/1998 1:17:00 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Mark, I have talked to the Drugstore.com people. I'm going to be all over this one. It's got everything going for it. A very well respected Ceo, recruited personally by KP. Its based in Seattle, home of a lot of Internet billionaires. Lots of seed cash. This is a Kleiner,Perkins special. Trust me on that.

To: Mark Fowler who wrote (30547)	12/20/1998 1:31:00 PM
From: KeepItSimple	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 164684

Monday Jan 4, 1999 (Reuters) The first trading day of the year has turned out to be one that most market participants would rather forget. After surging solidly into the end of the year on high hopes of increased revenues for dozens of internet related companies, the nasdaq gave back nearly 900 points, or 48 percent of its total value, in one frenzied afternoon session. "The bottom just fell out." one investor said, as she stood in a long line at a midtown manhattan Charles Schwab office in a vain attempt to sell her holdings- which included Dell, America Online, and Amazon. "Their website was down, and the telephone lines were busy- I was going to wait until tomorrow but then I saw the news reports on TV about the market going down 15 percent this morning so I took the subway over to the office. It didn't help, the line was around the corner by the time I got here." The scene was repeated across the country, when small investors suddenly decided today was the day to sell their portfolios. No major world crisis seems to blame, airstrikes against Iraq are not scheduled to resume until the end of the Islamic holy month, and President Al Gore has promised Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and secretary Rubin will continue to support irrational exhuberance by printing money as fast as the presses will run. Interest rates stand at 2 percent after an emergency midday meeting of the fed, and Greenspan was quoted this afternoon as saying "This should convince people to return their money into the equity markets, since we have now virtually eliminated the reward for saving dollars." One theory that has been put forward by some market watchers is that many traders had been putting off selling technology stocks that had enjoyed astronomical gains over the last two months, sometimes rising to dizzying heights, in order to avoid paying capital gains taxes just 4 short months from now. EBAY, the little-known online auction house that specializes in Beanie Babies and other collectible items, rocketed to a staggering 873 dollars per share by the end of the year, from an IPO price of only 20. Today the stock was halted, along with nearly every other internet related issue. The last trade before the halt was listed as 3 dollars, wiping out some 28 billion dollars of shareholder equity in one afternoon. (see chart insert) Most investors interviewed for this article flatly denied the first day of the new tax year had anything to do with their sudden universal desire to lock in profits. One elderly widower outside Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's office in lower manhattan, seen clutching her certificates of recent high flyer Amazon, was reportedly screaming at pedestrians in a desperate attempt to find a buyer for her shares. She angrily denied that she had helped create the catastrophe by selling on the first trading day of the new year: "What, do you think I'm stupid or something? cough MARY!! COME OUT HERE MARY!!" The Seattle-based bookseller halted trading at 2:15pm today, after it's publicly traded stock returned to earth- falling 315 points to close at 2 dollars per share.