Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Microcap & Penny Stocks : TSIG.com TIGI (formerly TSIG) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: vladimir rabinovich who wrote (15715)	1/24/1999 9:50:00 PM
From: cicak	Respond to of 44908

Hi Vladimir - you ask a very good question. The "effective date" on these deals is important and how many days after the effective date can we expect things to happen. Very fair and legitimate question. I thought you would find the following article from Baron's (25 JAN 99) interesting. The focus is on earnings and gross margin in the internet arena. We - TSIG shareholders - may become one of the first internet companies to post positive earnings - hopefully this quarter. That could be very big news in and of itself. From Baron's (an excerpt): ===================================================================== "Samberg: I want to divorce myself from that. I think there are maybe five Internet companies out there today that will still be around in 10-15 years -- and there are hundreds around today. What are they? One is America Online. I can't believe there's a soul in this room who doesn't believe that is a brand name with an economic future. I think Yahoo is clearly in that category. Call me crazy. I could mention a couple of others, but that would start to get me in more trouble. Amazon has a crack. But Amazon still has to prove they can make money. We've been big fans of Amazon -- I own Amazon. But I was disappointed that they didn't show a bit more progress last quarter in bringing it to the bottom line. Gradually, people are going to start to focus on -- Schafer: Is Amazon's business basically books? Gabelli: It has nothing to do with books or CDs, it's basically consumers buying things over the Internet. And the number of Internet subscribers is growing exponentially. Samberg: The investment question about Amazon is all about whether they can get enough gross margin. I mean, Dell had continually shrinking gross margins, and yet they were able to get enough profitability by getting their direct costs down. The real question with Amazon is whether they are going to be able to branch out into new things, like gifts, where they don't have the distribution as well set as they do in books. Where there isn't an existing infrastructure of other people supplying the back end. Will they have real-time computer links to those factories, so that they can fulfill orders in a timely way -- not get orders screwed up and customers ticked off at them? Can they just dominate that space? If they can dominate that space, Amazon can still be exciting. But I don't want to talk about the price today, because nobody can defend what's going on, on a daily basis. The only day these stocks have ever gone down is when Knight Securities [which executes stock trades for many of the largest online brokerage firms] had a computer outage one morning and they all went down 20%. I mean, there is nobody in this room who owns the Internet stocks, except for me, I guess. There are very few institutions that own these things. The individual either owns index funds, or -- when he buys something off Yahoo, he says, "Gee, that is pretty good, maybe I'll buy the stock." Then you get the day traders. Who's to say they are right or wrong? Neff: Okay, but who ends up owning those stocks at the end of the day, if the institutions don't own them? Schafer: The night traders. Samberg: The institutions are going to cave in. Mario is going to own them and Fidelity is going to own them. The Internet stocks are going to go down 50% in three days and then the institutions are going to come in. Because there isn't an institution alive that in two or three years won't have to own these stocks. I don't know at what price, but I refuse to believe these stocks are a bottomless pit, that they are all going to go to zero. There are about 200 of them that will go to zero. But not all."