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To: capitalistbeatnik who wrote (1452)	1/27/1999 12:06:00 PM
From: Platter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7772

Here is GREAT article this morning on MATH...(profitable internet play)...MathSoft CEO says it all adds up By Thom Calandra, CBS MarketWatch Last Update: 11:19 AM ET Jan 27, 1999Calandra on Evening News CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (CBS.MW) -- MathSoft is the little stock that could. Profitable the past six quarters, the Boston-area maker of data mining and mathematics software has endured a share price that, well, just doesn't add up. The stock at 4 gives the company a market capitalization of $38 million, or about 1.5 times yearly sales. President and CEO Charles Digate, who joined the company in 1994 after stints in consumer electronics at Lotus and Texas Instruments (TXN), isn't taking this academically. Digate managed to get a fillip in the stock price earlier this month when he unveiled an electronic commerce relationship with Amazon.com (AMZN). The press release -- and record profit of $2.2 million or 22 cents a share for the year, pulled the stock as high as 7. Alas, the stock has since relapsed. It's sitting at 4, puzzling even longtime believers like Alan Hicks, a San Jose, Calif., fund manager who still sees a bright future for the software developer. Digate, a soft-spoken executive who cut his teeth managing the sale of consumer software products, predicts MathSoft will break ground on several fronts. "We had been investing quite heavily our data mining business in Seattle," he says. Products called S-Plus and StatServer let biotechnology, pharmaceutical and financial companies perform quantitative analysis and test risk management models for their goods and services. If you believe in a world that is becoming more complex, you might see the potential for data mining. "Derivatives on Wall Street need analysis. Los of pharmaceutical companies use our software for their clinical trial," Digate says. MathSoft claims that engineers, money-geeks and other numbers crunchers use its data-mining software at 90 percent of the world's Fortune 1000 companies. Go compute that, investors. Another front for the company: high schools. Most ordinary folks know MathSoft because of its flagship Mathcad product for toiling students in mathematics labs. Study Works, another high school product, helps students with their homework. StudyWorks for Math and StudyWorks for Science have modules for U.S. college entrance aptitude tests, like the dreaded S.A.T.s. High school software, while only 10 percent of total revenue, is the fastest growing part of MathSoft. Digate says the product line grew 60 percent in 1998. Oh, and then there's that Internet thing. "Our web store sales (at www.mathsoft.com) have grown at a very high rate, albeit by a small amount," Digate says. "We have plans in place to exploit the online community." MathSoft, for instance, will become a reseller of others' software products. If all goes well on the Web, Digate sees MathSoft's revenue growth rate rising to 20 percent yearly from 15 percent now. "Our earnings are expected to grow much faster, because we can get a lot of leverage now over a fixed-cost basis," he says. The few Wall Street types who follow the company forecast 29 cents a share of profits this year, up from the 22 cents we mentioned above. Hicks at Ainsley Capital Management in California says MathSoft can beat those forecasts, if it sticks to its arithmetic. Digate is hopeful. "There is an opportunity for us to be a destination Web site for technologists; you don't have to be a Yahoo! to do that," he says. "This doesn't make us an Internet company by any means, but it does allow us to stick our head above licensing approaches and desktop models." A good whiff of the Internet never hurt anyone in the U.S. stock market, did it?

To: capitalistbeatnik who wrote (1452)	1/27/1999 12:35:00 PM
From: George Gotch	Respond to of 7772

I think this is really interesting... The whole concept of online trading conversing etc..we forget the sucker factor..It is like a herd of clueless cattle moving ahead...You have to go along on get out of the way..so you have all this stupid money or momenutum money chasing pure movement.. What is scary is this just loads the decks for Inet public companies especially small scam deals....use the nets vast information distribution to get out the insiders at huge profits.