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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock_bull69 who wrote (1775)	1/6/1999 8:10:00 PM
From: Narotham Reddy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Volatile AOL Trading on Thursday - WSJ January 6, 1999 To Fix Glitch, Mutual Funds Consider Changes to Prices By CHARLES GASPARINO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Some mutual-fund companies may make changes to year-end fund prices after a trading glitch caused several companies to publish inaccurate data in recent days. Tuesday, the Nasdaq Stock Market, which provides the price listings used by newspapers for more than 10,000 mutual funds, sent a memo to U.S. mutual-fund companies asking them to make any necessary changes to their year-end prices. The move came after a number of fund companies, including giant Fidelity Investments, experienced problems publishing accurate share prices for funds that held the stock of America Online Inc., which experienced year-end price swings on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, the last trading day of 1998. The swings caused confusion among mutual funds over the closing price for AOL that day. The problems affected several well-known funds, including Fidelity's Magellan Fund. In pricing shares of funds that held stock of the Internet company, several fund outfits initially used an incorrect, lower closing price for AOL when distributing per-share fund data to outlets for publication in newspapers and other uses. As a result, the price that mutual-fund buyers were charged to purchase funds that held AOL stock was actually higher than the too-low price that appeared in their newspaper fund listings. In a memo to fund companies, Nasdaq called on fund groups that may have a problem to "correct the closing" net-asset value of funds for 1998. The problem, Nasdaq officials say, is that end-of-year information is important in determining mutual-fund rankings and even tax issues that affect small investors. "If these NAVs [net asset values] don't reflect the actual value of the fund, there's a problem," said Mike Shokouhi, a Nasdaq spokesman. Fund companies will be able to contact Nasdaq Wednesday, from 9 a.m. to 5:50 p.m. EST. Who looks over the shoulder of mutual-fund firms to determine that their fund-price information is accurate? Actually, nobody. Nasdaq, the listing agent for most large mutual funds, has no legal authority to determine that the publicly released data are accurate. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which broadly regulates the fund industry, stands aside unless there is evidence of a violation of securities law. Officials at fund trackers Morningstar Inc. and Lipper Inc. also rely on the fund firms for accuracy. Fran Besztery, a Morningstar official in charge of fund-performance figures, noted that Fidelity officials telephoned her late last week to make changes to their year-end net asset values. "We had staff in braving the blizzard making some corrections," she said. "We have got to take on faith that the companies are giving us correct information," a Lipper spokeswoman said. She added that fund companies have been updating information since the close of the year in an effort to ensure that year-end data distributed by Lipper would be as accurate as possible. Lipper figures will appear in The Wall Street Journal's mutual-fund year-end section Thursday. Amid the volatile AOL trading on Thursday, several fund companies used a price of about $144 an AOL share based on the Internet company's near-closing price in Big Board trading. The mutual-fund share prices were then sent to Nasdaq, which distributes the mutual-fund pricing information to several fund vendors, such as Lipper Inc. But around 4:14 p.m. EST, the Big Board listed the final price of AOL at $160. (Ultimately, in composite stock-exchange trading, AOL closed Thursday at $155.125.) The problem for the fund companies was that their mutual-fund share prices already had been distributed based on the earlier, lower AOL per-share price. As a result, mutual-fund investors who thought they paid one price for shares of funds holding the Internet stock actually paid more, depending on how big a stake AOL represents in the funds they were buying.

To: stock_bull69 who wrote (1775)	1/6/1999 8:12:00 PM
From: Narotham Reddy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Ralph Acampora sees near term activity: 130-160 Jan 6, Wall Street journal Nnn234: Can I have your opinion on AOL & YHOO? Thank you. Racampora: AOL. Stock must consolidate gains. Near-term activity seen between 130 and 160. Stock is a buy-hold as long as it stays above 130. Yahoo is also a buy-hold as long as it stays above the 225 level.