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To: Jay8088 who wrote (33152)	1/7/1999 5:08:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>> Heard of cabbage patch dolls lately? << The rumor is, that Bezos will be selling them, next month. Watch the stock jump up 50%, when the PR machine announces that! Ps Day trader is already buying more shares in anticipation. 1 or 2 shares? I understand.

To: Jay8088 who wrote (33152)	1/7/1999 5:24:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Who said the institutions haven't been buying the 'Thing'? Mary Meeker? >>Robertson Stephens Emerging Growth Fund Jim Callinan felt the market gust in his face in 1998. A small-cap growth investor who worked for nine years at Putnam Investments before moving to Robertson Stephens in 1996, Mr. Callinan battled one of the toughest small-cap markets in decades. "This is the third year in a row that the big stocks have crushed the small ones," notes Mr. Callinan, 38. At the stock market's low in October, "we were extremely depressed. Everything was wrong. We were trying to get our confidence again." Mr. Callinan managed to finish very respectably, up 28%. That performance topped the S&P 500, no small feat given the market's big-cap bias, and it was light years away from the Russell 2000's 3.40% loss, and the Russell 2000 Growth Index's 1.20% gain. The fund's strong performance comes as only 42% of small-cap funds monitored by fund-tracker Morningstar Inc. last year posted positive returns. Mr. Callinan's secret: ignoring conventional wisdom. Confident that bargains were plentiful in a falling market, Mr. Callinan bought new stocks in September and October. "The test of a portfolio manager is not only his intelligence, but his courage during bad times," the manager says. Some stocks he scooped up doubled from their 1998 lows, helping the fund to its impressive 38% fourth-quarter gain. Mr. Callinan also benefited from his belief in Internet stocks, currently about 10% of his portfolio. Many money managers avoid the sector because so many Internet companies have been powered into nose-bleed valuation territory by hyperactive individual investors trading online. While Mr. Callinan is surprised at how fast Internet stocks have jumped and agrees some are overvalued, he says he buys the "good companies," as opposed to the "made-up ones" that venture capitalists rush to public markets. "I'm called an emerging-growth investor. People think the Internet is an emerging area of the economy, so I want to be there," he says. "We do believe this is a very powerful new medium." One of his favorite Internet stocks the last two years has been Amazon.com, which the fund first bought during the company's 1997 initial public offering. Up nearly 11-fold for the year, Amazon now has a market cap higher than 350 of the stocks in the blue-chip S&P 500. The small-cap fund manager has trimmed his position lately in Amazon because, he says, too many analysts follow the company, but adds he'll likely hang on to some of the stock because he likes Amazon's management. Other Internet holdings: Ameritrade Holding, which has a large online brokerage operation; Network Solutions, which registers Web addresses; and CMGI, which holds a stake in various Internet companies including Lycos and GeoCities. Mr. Callinan says he has been moving toward electronic-software and content companies and away from so-called Internet infrastructure companies. Despite hanging on to larger companies, Mr. Callinan keeps his fund's median market capitalization at about $650 million -- small-cap territory -- by looking at smaller companies for new purchases. The fund's top holdings at the end of the third quarter: TSI International Software (2.4%), Gemstar International (2.3%), ECsoft Group (2.2%), Amazon.com (2.0%), Financial Federal (1.7%) and Lamar Advertising (1.7%).<<

To: Jay8088 who wrote (33152)	1/7/1999 5:37:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>> London, Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. retailers are being ''trounced'' by their U.S. rivals in the U.K. Internet shopping market, an industry that is forecast to be worth 3.1 billion pounds ($5.13 billion) a year excluding financial services by 2003, according to a Fletcher Research report, the Financial Times reported, citing the report and business analyst Benjamin Ensor. U.K. Internet shopping currently represents less than 0.2 percent of the total market in the relevant retail sectors, but sales are expected to grow rapidly; half of the U.K.'s top fifty retailers have no online shopping facility, and many that have gone online are not spending enough money to attract customers, the newspaper said. The report predicts that online shopping will have the greatest impact in the sectors of personal computers, financial services, books and music, and says that U.K. retailers risk missing out on the boom to experienced U.S. groups, the newspaper reported. Amazon.com Inc., the No. 1 online book and music store, said fourth-quarter sales almost quadrupled to $250 million as more holiday shoppers ordered from its World Wide Web sites in the U.S. and overseas. (FT 1/7 8 www.ft.com) 03:32:16 01/07/1999