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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (16835)	1/2/1999 6:47:00 PM
From: HG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27307

Correction again. Biotech is definitely an exception. What can I say, I know nothing about biotechs, except that their timeframes are so long, results so unpredictable, stakes so high, so much politics and muscle power being wielded - and I'm impatient. Maybe that was the reason the sector never took off. <<<As long as these companies make our lives better they will succeed even if they make no money>>> That is the point. YHOO does make money, so does AOL and so does MSFT. Hence my position in all three. It probably CAN make more, but concentrates on building its customer base right now. What is fundamentally wrong with that ? Internet has imporved our lives not just by gluing us to the terminal. We can "talk" to our loved ones for next to nothing, we can spread our investments across oceans at no extra cost, we can we can we can...but I'm sure this is not the forum. If you got paid a commission to distribute every $100 bill, and you had millions of bills to distribute everyday, and the numbers were growing.....what then ?

To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (16835)	1/3/1999 7:56:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 27307

Oh, but profits don't matter. As long as these companies make our lives better they will succeed even if they make no money. I still miss the logic. I could stand out on the corner handing out $100 bills to everybody who walks by making all their lives a bit better, but it will not make me successful. I and Yahoo still need to earn a profit to be successful. Dave, There still are some rational people around. I was starting to run out of them;-) Glenn

To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (16835)	1/5/1999 3:05:00 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 27307

Dave, In browsing through a few posts (too many to read them all) I ran across this one from you. A couple of things I wanted to respond to: <<And internet companies have improved our lives by gluing us in front of monitors? Even if the internet improves our lives, it doesn't necessarily make the individual companies in the internet industry incredibly profitable. Oh, but profits don't matter. As long as these companies make our lives better they will succeed even if they make no money.>> We are having these conversations. You can do countless things that 5 years ago you couldn't do. Yes, Internet companies have improved our lives, I would argue dramatically so. And profits do matter, we already know that we agree on that. Where we may differ is in the last statement. If these companies continue to make our lives better, perhaps dramatically so, we will be willing to pay for it, directly or indirectly. TV was thought to have made our lives better (until Fox and the WB network came along, anyway), and when enough people paid attention to it or vegetated in front of it there were indeed large profits to be made. And so there will be with the Internet too. Right now you have a mad scramble for market leadership and an intentional sacrificing of short term profits to win that scramble. But when the scramble is over or becomes contained, there will be profits to go around, and the losers and stragglers will move on to other endeavors. <<I could stand out on the corner handing out $100 bills to everybody who walks by making all their lives a bit better, but it will not make me successful. I and Yahoo still need to earn a profit to be successful.>> Which Chicago street corner will you be on? If it's today, I'll wait until you freeze and then come and take the remaining $100's. With that much free money, I might even go long on YHOO. YHOO does earn a profit. They are not giving anything away any more than the major TV networks give away their programming. What both do is try to make it attractive for you to visit despite the ads, and then sell the ads based on how many people (and which people) visit. Where YHOO may have a long-term advantage, though, is that ads are not their only potential source or revenue; e-commerce looms as one of several pillars of future revenues. So none of these gloom and doom examples really carry the day. I would be surprised, make that shocked, if YHOO didn't have a billion dollars a year in revenue by the year 2005, probably sooner. The trouble is, how do they make enough margin on that to keep growing and satisfy investors that the stock is worth dramatically higher multiples than other companies? In 2005, I see a YHOO with 1-2 billion in revenues (that's 5 to 10 times 1998 levels) and a margin around 20 percent (a modest decline from 1998, but competition should dictate that), leaving 200-400 million in profits. If the stock doesn't go up at all -- not one YHOO cent -- in the next 6 years, you'd still have a PE of nearly 100, maybe more, at those numbers. Yeah, I know, earnings don't matter with Internets, yada yada yada, but the truth is, I can't think of a company that's been around a number of years with an established track record, good or bad, where earnings didn't matter. So my estimates of a YHOO 5 to 10 times as large as now in 6 years had better be way off for today's longs to make money by staying long until then. MAD DOG