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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stuart C Hall who wrote (168)	2/20/1999 3:24:00 AM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

>>Of all the Internet plays and all of the ISP's I see Broadband and AOL standing the test of time. I have a special place in my heart for aol. When I bought my first modem in 1994, it came with an aol diskette, so aol became my first ISP. I had been a passive investor up to that point (mutual funds and CDs), and used aol to set up a Cyber Portfolio. So it was natural that the first imaginary investment I made was to buy 100 shares of aol (I believe the symbol was amer at the time), and my success with it and the others (mot, hwp, intc) led to actually buying stocks. Of course, I wasn't bright enough to buy aol for real; I had read too many primers about p/e ratios to be "dumb enough" to buy a company that didn't have profits. I was hooked on aol and its content for almost a year before I ventured to sign on with netcom, but I carried both isp's for another 6 months before I could wean myself from aol. Last November I was looking for a sane Internet play, and decided that aol was it. I picked up a few hundred shares at 93 3/4 and watched it drift down. But then, out of the blue, they were added to the S&P500, and I have a 66.1% return in less than 3 months, with a split next week as a bonus. In December, I rebuilt my son's outdated 486-25, turned it into a p-100, and sent it to my 81 year old mom in Florida who had never used a computer in her life. I preloaded a pre-paid isp for her, and of course, it was aol. It took her through January to figure out how to play Solitaire, but I flew to W. Palm and put her through aol bootcamp in about a 3 day period, and now she is sending email to 3 generations of relatives scattered around the country, printing out lurid stories about Monica to show to her friends, and surfing the net to find recipes for diet cabbage soup <g>. Without the ease of aol's gui and excellent content, she'd be on her 10,000th game of solitaire by now. I think aol will continue to have a loyal following, despite their lack of a broadband solution, but I am confident Steve Case will find a solution soon; he's been too much of a visionary to overlook this next step. I know you're not supposed to fall in love with a stock, but aol enriched my life and those of countless others in the most positive of ways. And it's been a great investment, too. Frank