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Non-Tech : Tulipomania Blowoff Contest: Why and When will it end? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sir Auric Goldfinger who wrote (599)	1/11/1999 12:45:00 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Respond to of 3543

I was sure that the mania would have imploded after I got into CMGI on December 23. Ha! The single best trade of my life. Followed it up with OTM puts. Sold today the calls and repositioned up and out while locking in profits. If you can't beat em, join em. But I am hedging all the way. Oh yeah, grub 600.

To: Sir Auric Goldfinger who wrote (599)	1/11/1999 2:36:00 PM
From: bobby beara	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3543

#3 InterNutz will decline 40% from today's intraday highs. A blow-off top usually includes 3 gaps in the final leg up. (where the stock gaps up on the open higher than the previous close leaving an air pocket in the chart) The first gap is the breakaway gap, which is a break to new highs. THen an Intermediate gap. Final gap is call the exhaustion gap. Yhoo, CMGI and many of the boyz completed the exhaustion gap today. The long bond has broken uptrendline badly in the last several days and will cause a real nice correction, the laggard DOW is showing the weakness first today. GET OUT and GET SHORT NOW! bb

To: Sir Auric Goldfinger who wrote (599)	1/13/1999 3:47:00 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3543

Auric, JANUARY 13, 00:52 EST Individuals Fuel Web Stock Frenzy By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) — After a holiday season of hype about online commerce, it's time for ''e-companies'' to show whether business is good enough to justify an increasingly high-stakes rally by Internet stocks. Empowered by easy clicks, tiny trading costs and passionate feelings about the World Wide Web's potential for everything, online investors have helped fuel the buying frenzy, which most professionals call perilous. Mutual funds and other big investors, which are usually responsible for driving the stock market, have largely kept to the sidelines, fearful that some of the stocks may fall as quickly as they rose. If the Internet rally falters, it won't be Yahoo!'s fault, thanks to another robust profit report from the popular Internet site and search engine late Tuesday. But it's unclear whether lesser-known players will be able to prove that they're worth what Wall Street is paying for their shares these days. Most don't even have profits, and will only need to show higher sales or even declining losses in order to spark even more buying of their shares. Even the slightest disappointment could cause a major reversal. One of the chief reasons why individual investors are venturing into waters that the professionals are avoiding is that the Internet itself has made it so easy for people to move in and out of stocks every day. ''You have firms advertising that they can set up people as day traders. Give them 'X' amount of money, and they'll give you the software and the machinery,'' said Barry Berman, head trader at Robert W. Baird, a Milwaukee-based investment firm. Most eye-catching in this high-stakes game have been the daily moonshots fueled by Internet-related announcements from online newcomers and older companies trying to reinvent themselves. Last November, for instance, book store operator Books-A-Million announced the revamping of its Web site and saw its shares triple in one day. On any given day, and for no apparent reason, an industry ''veteran'' such as Yahoo! can soar 20 percent from levels that already represent a 1,000 percent gain in less than a year. Since professional money managers must report their performance to clients once a month, they have a strong incentive to stick with companies that have more dependable profits and stable share prices. Surprisingly, the investors who do seem willing to take chances are those with far less experience and much shallower pockets. ''In general, you don't see institutions paying the kind of (prices) you've got on those kinds of stocks,'' said Berman. He noted that a large amount of trading in Internet-related companies is being conducted in 200- or 300-share blocks rather than the thousands often bought and sold in each trade by major portfolio managers. Even the few mutual funds that bill themselves as cyber-minded rarely stray beyond the big names like AOL and Yahoo! The Robertson Stephens Information Age Fund, which normally devotes about 65 percent of its portfolio to the information technology industry, counted America Online, Amazon.com and Yahoo! among its top ten holdings at the end of September. But those three stocks accounted for only about 13 percent of the fund's holdings, while about a third of its assets were tied up in plain old hardware and software giants such as Intel, Microsoft and Compaq Computer. Naturally, since mutual funds don't need to disclose all their day-to-day dealings, it's likely that many are trading in some of the more speculative issues. But the Internet stock runup has been too frantic, analysts say, to be solely the work of institutional trading. ''There can't be that many sophisticated traders out there. Even sophisticated traders are avoiding this group because it's a very irrational thing that's going on,'' said Ricky Harrington, technical analyst at Interstate/Johnson Lane in Charlotte, N.C. ''The way Internet stocks are trading is extremely risky even for most sophisticated trader and dynamite for those who are not,'' said Harrington, asserting that investors can't possibly expect to catch every winning stock or sector. KJC