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

To: H James Morris who wrote (32353)	1/3/1999 9:23:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

You don't expect him to lend his company any of his personal new found multi-millions! Do you?. A former hedge fund guy wouldn't do that. James, I never would expect that of him. Trust me;-) Glenn

To: H James Morris who wrote (32353)	1/4/1999 3:07:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

>>c The Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) -- As a new year dawns on Wall Street, many investors are faced with a thorny problem: What to do, or what not to do, about the mania for Internet stocks. Any prudent adviser will tell you how dangerous it is to try to ride this wave, which has lately broadened from technology companies to merchandisers engaged in Internet commerce, commonly known as ''E-tailing.'' By any traditional measure, these stocks typically sell at outlandish prices. One of the biggest names in the field, the book and music dealer Amazon.com, has seen its shares skyrocket more than 1,300 percent in the past 12 months. Though the company has not yet reported its first dollar of profit, investors have assigned it a market value greater than many of the biggest, long-established names in the retailing business. Elsewhere, shares of both established and new companies that announce plans for E-tailing ventures routinely jump 50 percent, 100 percent or more in a single day's trading. In the past few days, America Online has been added to the Standard & Poor's 500-stock composite index, where it immediately ranks among the top 10 percent in market value, and Charles Schwab & Co. has surpassed longtime financial titan Merrill Lynch in market value. ''Somehow I have the feeling that this is all going to end badly,'' says Ray DeVoe, a veteran market analyst at Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc. ''An old saying in Wall Street is that the high-flyers of a bull market all seem to sell around $5 a share at the bottom of the cycle. This looks to me like another one.'' But if you simply adopt a hands-off policy to any investments with links to the Internet, you run the very real risk of watching from the sidelines as a dramatic story of economic progress keeps unfolding. For individuals managing only their own money, this may mean nothing more than lost opportunity. But for professionals making fiduciary decisions, other things like their jobs and their reputations may be on the line. ''You have to own tech in a portfolio,'' says Fred Taylor, chief investment officer at New York's U.S. Trust Co., which has been in the business of managing wealthy people's money for nearly 150 years. ''You just can't have only yesterday's stocks.'' The way the game has been going lately, investors may find themselves suddenly in the midst of the action even if they never sought to buy an Internet stock. Plenty of staunch tech-avoiders own stocks like Schwab, or shares of some established catalog or specialty retailer that suddenly becomes a hot Internet property when attention focuses on its World Wide Web site. So before you conclude that you're not involved in Netmania, check the latest list of portfolio holdings from any stock mutual fund you may own. Once you truly get away from the Internet hubbub, many other sectors of the stock market are remarkably quiet. Heading into the last few sessions of 1998, calculates market strategist John Manley at Salomon Smith Barney, just 50 of the 500 stocks in the S&P composite accounted for 94 percent of the index's gain, which came to a little more than 22 percent for the year to date. That left the other 450 stocks with a gain of about 1.5 percent. Small stocks, in the aggregate, made no progress at all. And an investor warned that Internet mania might be a sign of an impending market break might easily reply, ''Bear market? We just had one three months ago!'' So what this all means for the future remains very much a mystery. As for the recent past, summarizes Manley, ''while 1998 may be remembered as a great year for equities and equity investors, in truth there was very little easy money to be made.'' <<