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Technology Stocks : CMGI What is the latest news on this stock? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (4302)	1/23/1999 10:23:00 AM
From: lin huan chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19700

Excerpt from Barron's Round Table: Samberg: They should get onto a chat room and talk to their friends about their stocks. Because what do I bring to them? It is truly amazing. I don't know if any of you have read any of that stuff. I have had my name faked, used in the chat rooms. When you are in a regulated industry and you see what is going on in those chat rooms, you just scratch your head and wonder how you are supposed to deal with it. I am rarely speechless, but I really don't know what to tell you. I talked about two stocks, in '94 or '95. I don't remember. America Online and CMG Information Systems [now CMGI Inc.]. Split-adjusted, each of them was trading at $3-and-change when I talked about them. America Online is up another 6 or 8 today. It's at 160. CMG is up to 240(before split). The guy who runs it is brilliant. David Wetherell. He's the guy who seeded Lycos. He seeded GeoCities. A bunch of stuff. He is not responsible for the stock's valuation. But if you were to look at the value of CMG today, and look at the value of its percentage ownership in other publicly traded stocks and private holdings -- in other words, do the kind of analysis that Mario would do and that I usually don't do -- you'd find that the liquid stocks are worth about $55 a CMG share. And that is as of Friday [January 8], because God knows what is happening today. But then CMG also has a bunch of illiquids and venture-capital investments that look like they might make it. If you assign really generous valuations to them, they add up to $26.50. Q: Really generous? Samberg: Well, I happen to be a venture investor, on my own, in one of his venture deals. We put money into it -- $12 million. Six months later, some money came in at a $90 million valuation. And I see looking at my spreadsheet here that we are valuing that deal at a lot more than that. Anyway, I have the combination of the liquid and the illiquid stakes generously valued at about $81 a CMG share. It also fully owns some companies they are trying to develop. Those things produce humongous cash-flow losses. So CMG is reporting $80-$100 million a year in real cash losses. What are you going to do with those? You have to subtract them from that $81, I guess. Say two years of those losses, because it will take two years to get these things to make money. Then, there is a little bit of debt. So you end up with an enterprise value of about $70. This is just the way the world is. The stock closed at $200 on Friday. It was up 40 this morning. And I don't know what the defining event was that made it go up 40. Art Samberg Co-founder, chairman and CEO, Pequot Capital Management, Westport, Conn Lin * pls, no hate mails