To: 16yearcycle who wrote (36344 ) 1/24/1999 7:43:00 PM From: Glenn D. Rudolph Respond to of 164685
The Internet Capitalist SG Cowen Internet Research 5 pages that day, we were surprised by the dearth of sports figures that were able to call their own top and retire with dignity, poise, and great reputations. Because almost all things come back around to the Internet for this research group, we got to thinking how difficult calling the top is in this business, too, and just how few people have been successful at it. We don't pretend to be smart enough to time the Internet sector up or down, though lots of cycles have been spent trying to determine just that. Instead, we tend to take the Ockham's razor approach to Internet investing; that simple rules are preferable to complex ones. So when asked over the last few weeks and months about where the “top” would be in the Internet sector, we often mumbled something about long term horizons and buying programs. That is, until we were faced with an actual call on what to do with Yahoo! at $48 billion on January 13th, the day they reported their Q4. We wish we had coined the term “buy the mystery, sell the history”, but since we didn't we'll gladly pass it on as a possible explanation for the price action in Yahoo!'s stock after they reported what was another very strong quarter last week. The day after Yahoo!'s announcement that they grew revenue 40% sequentially and bested even the most ardent Internet bulls' estimates, the stock…… dropped 60 points (and as of this writing is off more than 100 points from the level it achieved after the earnings announcement). Though there can be no doubt that whisper number expectations had some effect on this sell-off, we think it's worth repeating our own thought process that we shared with our institutional sales people the morning after the Q4 results (beware that these comments are a few days old as of this writing), since it speaks both to our investment philosophy within the entire Internet space (that Ockham's razor thing) as well as some specific thoughts on Yahoo!: What To Do With YHOO At These Levels?… If you're like us, you search for perspective, an exercise we've been engaging in for the last several weeks (ok, months) as we've watched with astonishment as all manner of Internet stocks have taken off. We've attempted to illustrate our evolving thinking on valuation via many forums, but suffice it to say that, to a certain extent in the Internet space, we're still dealing with the unknown. Even getting to a broad sense of what leading Internet companies with exposure to as much revenue and having as attractive a business model as YHOO are worth is a tough (and imprecise) business. And for fun late last night we went back over a model of YHOO that we kept from January 1997. Our thinking at that time was that in 1998 YHOO would report $0.12 per share in EPS on something like $65 million in revenue Well, history now shows YHOO's 1998 EPS at $0.45 on revenue of $203 million, 275% and 202% higher respectively than what we (and the company, we may add) thought was aggressive then. Now we're not saying that the 2000 actual EPS estimate will be 275% higher than what you see in our estimates, but our gut tells us that the earnings and cash flow upside remains too big to quantify with any precision, and our recall from the cold days of early 1997 adds weight to that feeling. That said, we're as harried about the fact that YHOO now has a market cap higher than all but Disney, Time Warner, and AOL as you probably are. When this company was worth $500 million in the winter of 1997, we thought a market cap of $5 billion was probable in time; when it reached $5 billion, we thought $50 billion was, perhaps, possible in time; and now that it is almost $50 billion, we think…we