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

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (33852)	1/9/1999 6:08:00 PM
From: Dan Woodbury	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Glenn said: Online shopping has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is one need not leave the house to shop. The company will have to charge the consumer more for this convenience. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Of course, I recently noticed that Wal-mart had a Bette Midler CD for 12.99 that CDNOW also priced at 12.99. And with shipping and the 2 day wait.... Another factor to consider when valuing the internet sector: All mature industries are typically dominated by 3-5 companies. ie (GM, Ford, Chryser, Toyota, Honda), (Walmart, Sears, K-mart, Target), (Disney, Time Warner, Viacom) (AT&T, MCI-Worldcom, Sprint) etc... As the internet sector matures which companies will dominate the e-media and e-commerce space? Careful, this isn't just a matter of picking between Yahoo and Excite and between Amazon and CDNow. The current Fortune 500 is just as eager to make money as Yahoo and if Wal-mart or Disney recognizes that it can get a 10% return on its money doing the internet thing, or that it must do the internet thing to save 10%, you better believe they will build that business. And, as much as we might think customers will be loyal to Yahoo, Aol and Amazon, thousands of years of free market behavior has shown that customers will choose the brand and product that provides the best value. Wasn't it just 5 years ago that Nike and Levis were "the" brand. Gee, now "the" brands are Doc Martens and Old Navy. You think it was unfair of Old Navy to become so much more popular than Levi? Do you think honestly think Old Navy will be "the" brand 20 years from now? Yahoo and Amazon and Aol don't have any "lock" on the marketplace. They may have the greatest mindshare but there are no guarantees that will continue. So while Amazon can feel great about pulling in 250 million e-commerce dollars in Q4, Wal-mart does that much business every day! Did any of you Amazon investors understand that? Walmart sells 100,000,000,000 dollars worth of stuff each year. That's over 300 million dollars a day. Do you really think Amazon deserves as much as 1 / 100th the market valuation as Wal-Mart? And yet right now Wall Street says it is worth 1/5th the value of the big Kahuna. Secondly, the basic services that websites provide are communications, media / entertainement and retail. The bottom line is that these are services and thus only worth what customers are willing to pay for them - unlike a manufactured good which has some intrinsic value. As far as I can tell, customers aren't willing to pay that much for these services. Yahoo exacts zero premiums from users and its annual advertising revenue is what? a couple of hundred million? Someone explain to me how Yahoo is going to scale its advertising revenue to 20 billion dollars to justify its 40 million dollar capitalization? It can't be done. Remember, a big part of Disney's revenue stream is that they can charge $50 to the 150,000 customers who visit their theme parks each day. Honestly, how many of you would touch Yahoo's web site if it cost you only $1 a day? Not many of us would, would we since there are lots of other sites to choose from. Amazon grew its business 3 fold in 98 but, as Glenn has pointed out, they assumed the cost of fulfilling orders for online shoppers who sat on their butts and clicked on their mouse. It is unavoidable that Amazon will have to raise prices and, despite this being the "new economy", there are very few goods for which the quantity demanded rises as the price rises (expect of course for internet stocks which do seem to become more popular the more expensive they become...) This is a mania. A bubble of gigantic proportions. Kind of fun and kind of scary. But please, lets have no more idiots claiming that AMZN and YHOO are going to double this year based on fundamentals. The lunacy in the market may continue but it will end. It always does.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (33852)	1/10/1999 11:08:00 AM
From: MoonBrother	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

Glenn, No offense, but I have to say that I laughed all the way through my reading of your post (33855). While I am sure you are a kind of serious person who has done thorough research on AMZN, and found all sorts of imbalance on its valuation, you have to know that this is a stock market, not a Concept/Valuation debate forum. I can understand your opinion and to some degree agree with you toward AMZN, but the realty is that just because you believe your thought is right, doesn't mean you make any money on it. In fact, your "correct" opinion has caused you dearly, more than $500/per share in total I guess? You come here to make money, right? Why you were so stubborn to lose your OWN money to fight for so-called "valuation"? As I said before, even if your opinion proves to be correct by year 2002 and AMZN drops to $10, were you be able to survive until then to make your loss back? Let me say this, the fact that I'm now seeing more shorts on this board make me very happy. This means AMZN still has a long way to move up. The more AMZN moves up, the more 'rediculous' its valuation will look like, and the more perhaps you shorts claiming the "top", and the more we long make money by squeezing you guys. How clearer I have to state this situation over and over again? I just want to laugh when I saw some of the newbies on this board claiming the longs have "pea-sized brain", and he/she is so smart to catch AMZN's top. What a joke. Read Mr. Banjeman's comments I posted earlier, you would notice that there are tons of people like them, i.e. institutional investors, waiting AMZN to pullback and jump in. He was stunned by how short the supposed "bad news" on $250mil Q4 revenue had effected AMZN. As we all know, so far institutions have not played big part in AMZN's growth. Many of them are eagerly waiting for the sizable drop of it in order to get in. As time passes, I can feel that their patience will quickly run out as they see even a bad news won't pull down the stock. More and more of them will have to jump in at any weakness AMZN might have. Based on this observation, my prediction on Monday morning is as follows (some of you have asked for this), Monday morning, if S&P future indicates a rather negative opening, say down 8 ~ 10 pts, then AMZN could open at 10 pts lower at around $150. But in less than 20 minutes we should see AMZN trading back to positive ground, and move higher from there. If S&P future indicates a flat opening, then AMZN could start at $170 range, and moved rapidly toward $200 mark. If S&P future indicates a strong opening, say up 8 ~ 10 pts, then we could see AMZN opens at $185 ~ $190 range, and move solidly above $200 within an hour. When all the dust settles by closing time, we shall see AMZN trades at $200 range, barring any major market's downside movements and/or AMZN's own extremely unexpected bad news. Good luck, especially to shorts! You really need it!!! MB