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

To: tommy gunn who wrote (31272)	12/27/1998 10:39:00 AM
From: llamaphlegm	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Dunce awards from NYT's today UNDUE DILIGENCE AWARD To Goldman, Sachs. The investment bank reaped millions in underwriting fees on two Russian bond deals peddled to customers last June and July. Not long after the ink on the $7.65 billion in bonds was dry, Russia's banking system collapsed, making the bonds worthless. The firm earned $56 million on the July deal alone. BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE RESEARCH AWARD To Henry Blodget, Internet stock analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. On Dec. 16, Blodget raised his year-end 1999 price target for Amazon.com from $150 a share to $400. That would give the Internet darling a market capitalization of $21 billion -- one-third the value of all books sold in the world at retail last year. Blodget told Bloomberg News that he raised his price target because Amazon.com had blown through the one he had set earlier. The day Blodget made his optimism public to the investing masses, Amazon shares jumped 17 percent, to $289. A week later, the stock was at $325. Could a $500 price target be far behind? IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE AWARD To number crunchers at the United States Treasury. Earlier this month, the Treasury revealed that miscalculations meant it had paid Social Security and other trust funds $1.4 billion in extra interest since 1980. And Uncle Sam is afraid to privatize Social Security, so average Americans can control their own retirement accounts? YEAR'S BEST TRADE AWARD To the risk management committee of Switzerland's UBS A.G., the world's second-largest bank. UBS wanted so desperately to invest in the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund that it made personal loans to the fund's partners and bought an $800 million stake in Long-Term Capital as part of a complex derivative transaction. When the teetering hedge fund had to be rescued by a consortium of Wall Street banks and brokerage firms in September, UBS wound up writing off its investment, losing $700 million in the process. The bank's chairman, Mathis Cabiallavetta, and three other top executives resigned over the disaster. A SOW'S EAR IS A SOW'S EAR AWARD To executives of the Zapata Corp., a fish oil and meat-casing company in Houston. Hoping to breathe a little life into the company's stock, Zapata management announced plans in July to become "one of the largest Internet companies in the world." How? By buying or investing in enough World Wide Web sites so that it could compete with established search engines like Yahoo and Excite. Investors snapped up Zapata shares on the news, pushing the formerly comatose stock from around $10 to almost $23. Alas, the Internet plans fizzled, the company returned to fish oil and the stock fell back to earth -- until the company announced last week that its Internet onslaught was back on track.