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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: B. A. Marlow who wrote (5038)	1/31/1999 11:14:00 AM
From: Jill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Hmmm. This is my first post though I've been lurking on various SI threads for months. I'm a journalist. Your idea is good but it takes a lot of work. Some other possibilities might be 1) to collect excerpts from some of the posts over the last 2 years, through the peaks and valleys, the longs and shorts, and assemble a juicy but relatively short enticing overview and send it to some of the online financial portals such a CNNfn, or MSNBC (the editors are e-mail-able), with the pitch perhaps being a behind the scenes look at the phenomenon of message boards, of the incredible amount of DD and good research on them, of the human interest [i.e...the faith of some longs, the manipulating tactics of some shorts, as commented on in posts of recent days), and of the hope of getting in before something goes big. The subject would be AXC but in a sense it wouldn't--the pitch would be broader, and AXC happens to be an instance of what we're talking about. 2) Another option is to do what Raging Bull does very nicely, which is to offer a daily "newsletter" summary of the most interesting posts, thus in a sense weaving together an in-the-trenches report. SI does a sort of thing like this but not often enough. The posts on Raging Bull are about l/2 step above Yahoo. They're not often very good. SI posts are a hundred times better but the homepage site itself is not active enough, it doesn't offer enough. It's too passive. It should have a daily flow of news.

To: B. A. Marlow who wrote (5038)	1/31/1999 3:19:00 PM
From: HPilot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Haven't posted in a long time but have lurked some. Have noticed that in general the $5 price is a strong resistance and support area for most stocks. So expect AXC to bob above and below that point till the next news good or bad. If CEO's are reading. 1. Why doesn't Ampex produce an 8mm version of the DST? 2. Since HDTV is having slow acceptance. Why not a satellite system/channel devoted to HDTV broadcasting? Especially with video on demand with Ampex DST as the backbone of the storage requirement. A alternate channel could broadcast video on demand for computers equipped with satellite receivers.

To: B. A. Marlow who wrote (5038)	2/1/1999 1:33:00 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 17679

I'll pass on that one, BAM. I think between you, Jill N., and the newer shareholders you can take this one to a more realistic level. Some of us have been 'freestyling' for a while. I'm glad that Dave M. found the time to join us here. I'll chip in when I have something useful to say and the time to say it.

To: B. A. Marlow who wrote (5038)	2/1/1999 9:32:00 AM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 17679

Let's understand something, folks. If we want to go to $40, we need to make it happen. Any interest? I think this sounds too close to hyping the stock. AXC has been hyped in the past, but I can't speak from first-hand experience since I got in after the crash which followed the hype. But from what I have gathered on this thread and elsewhere, there were "boiler-room" high-pressure cold-call telephone sales on the part of some brokers when the KM frenzy was going on as well as the usual rumors and speculation. This left a bad taste in many peoples' mouths as well as a hole in their wallets. In the long run, this kind of thing damages Ampex's reputation. Ampex's reputation for quality is one of the best things the company has going for it. So hyping the stock is exactly what long-term holders of the stock, the real believers in the company, don't want. Furthermore, one of the main complaints of people on this thread has been the dearth of news coming out of the company. The silence has been blamed in part for the drastic slide in price. But this reticence on the part of Bramson and Co. could very well be not just due to current business considerations, but a reaction to the results of the past hype. Having seen investors burned before, and having seen Ampex's reputation take a hit, Bramson may have decided to try his utmost to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. Hence, only an ultra-conservative release of news and no attempt to paint a bright picture for the company's future without any overwhelming evidence. Another problem of going beyond analyzing a stock to boosting it is that it invites if not justifies the opposite - the bad-mouthing from shorts that has been conspicuously absent on this thread... so far. This thread has so far been the most friendly and civil of any I have encountered, probably because the only posters were long-time longs commiserating with each other. Their posts have been imaginative, educational, and often full of technical detail. Sometimes wry, often hopeful, but distinctly lacking in hype. Let us keep that reputation so that in the future no loud-mouthed short can make any accusations. The very limited number of posters has already changed, as can be seen by the explosion in the number of posts from new participants and old-time lurkers. The friendliness and civility are still going strong. Finally, we are never going to make AXC a $40 stock. Ampex the company is going to have to perform, growing the revenues and the profits. Otherwise the price will sooner or later collapse at the same or greater speed at which it spiked up. When I look at the InterNUT stocks, what I see is the Tokyo real-estate market before the big crash. At one time, the total real-estate value in Tokyo was said to exceed that of the entire U.S. Yeah, right. Like 300 million people would ever exchange a whole continent for a cramped city? This common sense comparison must have made people uneasy at the time, but they ignored it because the entire system ended up being built around that real-estate - bank loans, stock prices, company assets, balance sheets, office rents. It went on for years, but one day it all fell down like a house of cards. Bramson has chosen to acquire companies which have chosen a different track than Amazon.com, one more like his own, namely grow conservatively and continue to turn a profit, rather than pour billions of dollars into an attempt to get a "name" and hope to dominate some market segment later. I say more power to Bramson. Will Amazon.com be able to put barnesandnoble.com out of business? If so, will that matter when everyone and anyone can sell books and records over the web? If so, will that mean that they can start price-gouging later to make a profit? I buy most of my books on-line now, at 20% discount, which is offset by the delivery charge. If they're losing money on every book now, how are they EVER going to make money? It's not like software, where the discounts are like giving it away free. People might forget that Amazon.com doesn't have all the cash to burn that the market cap might imply. The IPO price determined what cash they took in, and wasn't that down in the $10-20 range? When the cash runs out, what happens to those holding the $400 stock? I'm not down on the Internet, and I'm not down on the future of on-line sales. I LOVE buying stuff on-line. What I can't stomach is the current price levels. It seems like the best possible future results for the next 10 years have already been added in to the prices because people fear on missing out on the next big thing. For those versed in audio and electronics, a large phase shift between price and current intrinsic value. And now the hype of these companies is feeding on itself. We're seeing makemerich.com and tomdickandharry.com companies hyping themselves by comparing themselves to already successfully hyped companies: "Hey, if THEIR stock prices can be boosted out of the stratosphere, OURS can too! Better jump in NOW!" What a sucker play. It's sort of a mass pyramid scheme, in the market as a whole, that nobody organized.