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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lml who wrote (9427)	1/29/1999 1:06:00 PM
From: John Wright	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19080

lml, I agree with your observations that "... the ORCL management team in place know their business better than the competition & better than the analysts...." As an add-on to this I'd like to re-iterate some of the points I've mentioned in previous posts. Most of the players in the database and ERP marketplace have tiny market valuations, and technical and financial resources relative to Oracle. The industry is in for a major shakeout where many of the players will eventually cease to exist or at best be marginal non-competitive players. Baan will be the first to disappear. Who will be next? I don't know? Will their be acquisitions? Possibly. At the end of the day I have to believe Oracle is very quickly becoming the 900lb Gorilla that will dominate the DB, ERP, and Ecommerce marketplace for Enterprise Software. These windows of investment opportunity only happen once in a lifetime. SAP, ORCL's next largest mkt cap competitor(also with technical and financial resources) will continue to stumble and fall like the small caps. Thoughts, opinions, anyone? John

To: lml who wrote (9427)	1/29/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: Bipin Prasad	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19080

Economist Magazine: Internet Stock Bubble Waiting To Burst - Rpt Newstraders - January 29, 1999 15:12 (NewsTraders.com)-- The seemingly endless rally behind Internet-related stocks will eventually end because there are just too many ominous factors waiting to jolt the market back to reality, according to the Economist Magazine. Although the magazine didn't estimate when a "correction" would occur, it provided a number of issues that might lead to a shakeup. Highlights: - Troubling valuations: Amazon.com's (AMZN) market capitalization is greater than Texaco (TX) or all of the bookstores in the U.S., while Yahoo (YHOO) is valued greater than Boeing (BA). - Technology consultant Forrester research predicts that online retail sales in the U.S. will reach $108 billion in 2003, however, that robust figure will only account for 5% of total retail sales. - Amazon may have a dominant brand name and winning business model, but as competitors attack its dominance and begin to undercut it on price, margins on sales will be severely squeezed. When consumers begin using "bots" -- search engines that seek out the cheapest price among a number of e-tailers -- dominant players like Amazon will feel even more pricing pressure. "Amazon could yet become a $10 billion business with the profits of a corner store," says the Economist. - Much of America Online's (AOL) income is derived from subscriptions, but what happens when Internet access becomes a free commodity? The company might also be denied access to broadband cable networks, which are likely to emerge as the most popular providers for high-speed access in the near future. - None of the popular Web portals have tried to distinguish themselves by appealing to a defined group, like most traditional media. They eventually might have to make that transition in order to grab a loyal fan base, and thus profits, from fickle Internet surfers. - Thin floats -- the actual amount of shares available for trading -- has created further volatility on Internet stocks. - Short sellers who have been burned have thrown fuel on the fire because they've had to buy back positions at higher prices. - If a sell-off happens, day traders could get smacked if online brokerages can't handle the large volume of trades and panic might ensue. - The argument that many of the Web's monster stocks -- such as AOL, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay (EBAY) -- are the next Microsoft's (MSFT) of the Internet and thus deserve the stratospheric valuations is somewhat troubling because none of them have a dominant proprietary technology like the software giant enjoys. "It is hard for Internet companies to create the technological lock-in that has made the Windows operating system so dominant," the Economist says. - The real winners and safer companies to bet on are ones that have built the Internet and serve those companies mentioned above. This includes Cisco Systems (CSCO), Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL), Sun Microsystems (SUNW), IBM (IBM), Lucent (LU) and even MCI WorldCom (WCOM) and ATT (T).