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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (32160)	1/1/1999 10:17:00 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

William, I know you hate this negative press. After all you made your fortune fighting against it. >> NEW YORK (AP) -- Don't look too closely for wild celebrations on Wall Street as 1999 gets under way. The harrowing dips in the market last year left their mark on investors, and many are cautious about the year ahead. ''The mood with investors is like a soldier coming back from battle -- a much wiser soldier,'' said Russ Labrasca, national sales manager at State Street Research, a Boston mutual fund company. ''Many of them have a new respect for risk.'' All three main stock market indicators posted their unprecedented fourth straight year of double-digit gains. The Dow Jones average rose 16.1 percent, ending the year at 9,181, the Standard & Poor's 500 gained 26.7 percent, and the Nasdaq gained a startling 39.6 percent. Of the Dow's 200 highest closes of all time, 192 came in 1998. But for many new investors, last summer's selloff was a jarring introduction to sharp market swings. On 16 occasions, the sharp price swings left the Dow more than 200 points higher or lower in a single day. Online investor Charles Burroughs of Denver, who visited the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, said 1998's market swings left him feeling dazed. ''While you have money, you're on a big high, and you wake up in October with no money. Then you wake up again, and it's all back,'' he said. ''It was all the way up, it was all the way down -- if you're lucky enough, you're even now.'' Even investing pros were unsettled. Especially worrisome for them was the recent frenzy over Internet-related companies. Stocks of online retailers like Amazon.com have soared to seemingly unsustainable heights. ''Sometime we are going to have to pay back some of this. It just doesn't stay this way forever,'' said Edward Collins, a trader at Daiwa Securities America in New York. The year started off looking a lot like the three years before it, which all produced double-digit gains in the Dow. The Dow romped through record after record in the first half of the year, peaking on July 17 just as the global financial crisis flared again. In just six weeks, the measure of 30 major blue-chip companies tumbled 19.3 percent. The Asian financial crisis spread to Latin America, Russia defaulted on its debt and U.S. companies started feeling the pinch. Was it a bear market? Market watchers can't seem to agree. The classical definition of a bear market is a decline of 20 percent, so some say that the Dow's decline just missed it -- which means Wall Street's eight-year bull run is still going. Despite a strong recovery this fall in blue-chip companies and the big players in the S&P 500 index, many smaller company stocks remain in negative territory for the year. And the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies closed down for the year, its first losing year since 1994. ''I wouldn't say it was the best year for the market,'' Carlos Carela, a broker clerk for Lehman Brothers, said while taking a cigarette break outside the stock exchange. ''With the volatility it's so risky.'' . AP-NY-01-01-99 0128EST

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (32160)	1/1/1999 10:18:00 PM
From: KeepItSimple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>The holidays. Newspaper classified advertising drops during the >holidays, too. Hello William, I just tried an experiment you might like to reproduce for yourself. Go to Ebay, and enter in random auction numbers. Just pick 10 at random. Now out of those 10, how many have received bids at all? how many have received a bid at least equal to the minimum amount listed for that particular auction? My results from two 10-bid tests: 9 no bid 1 minimum bid not met yet 2nd set 8 no bid 2 minimum bid not met yet You can trust me on this- Ebay uses "# of open auctions" as a traffic indicator rather than "# of auctions anyone has actually bid on" Because it appears 80-90 percent of the secondhand crap on there never gets sold.

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (32160)	1/2/1999 8:53:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

>>What can that mean? The holidays. Newspaper classified advertising drops during the holidays, too. More people are on the net now. The user base is growing. Your answer does not hold water. Glenn