To: CGarcia who wrote (1202 ) 2/25/1999 6:48:00 PM From: Platter Respond to
From Briefing.com..(DAYTRADER) Don't let the television talking heads fool you: Institutional investors are concerned that this market could come unglued at any moment. But as long as "market pundits" are able to convince the individual investor that the indices have upside (which they have done with tremendous success), the money will continue to flow into mutual funds, and managers will continue to put it to work. As those of you who have invested in small-cap stocks over the past year may have noticed, money managers have almost completely lost interest in uncovering value. The few that have attempted to take the road less-traveled have found themselves on a dead end street. The philosophy of this market has been to purchase liquid, large-cap names that have a history of delivering on promises (i.e. Microsoft, Cisco, America Online, Yahoo!). As Dell Computer has demonstrated recently, even the market's elite must eventually submit to the pressures created by international economic turmoil, a slowing domestic economy and fading pricing power. The one group that we believe will continue to be immune to these realities is the Internet. Over the past two years, the group has become almost entirely momentum driven. The only people who still talk about the fundamentals of this group are those who are short or not invested. Much of the movement tends to be theme-based. Examples of recent themes include: the search-engine to portal evolution; Internet/traditional media integration; e-commerce; mergers/acquisition. By quickly processing the presence of a new trend, traders have repeatedly been given the opportunity to log robust short-term gains by positioning themselves in the group's second and third tier names. While we cannot predict what the next trend will be, there is little doubt in our mind that analysts and investors will return to the e-commerce theme in the 4th qtr of the year. Briefing.com will continue to do its best to keep investors on top of developing trends, such as the one that recently launched online trading-related stocks.
