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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: llamaphlegm who wrote (45106)	3/11/1999 12:20:00 AM
From: larry oertel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>like lonely voices whistling in the wind < Yes the Bears are getting scarce around here, which I guess is a good contrarian indicator. Did you notice the large ads in USA Today and other papers for shopping.com. They did a price and shipping comparison between their prices and Amazon.com, B&N and others for various books, CD's camera's etc. Very nicely done and quite a eye catcher. To anyone who noticed the ad the message was clear, Amazon.com prices are some of the highest in cyberspace. IMHO this is just the beginning of the on-line price wars. Mr. Greeenburg had this to say today: Amazon.com (AMZN:Nasdaq): What would happen if a company like, say, Buy.com starts aggressively undercutting Amazon, forcing its margins to fall by half? And Amazon recently raised $1.2 billion in a convertible debt offering. What would happen if it got in a cash squeeze and couldn't make the payments on that loan, or repay that loan? (Just asking.) Eventually it will have to. And Amazon recently bought a stake in drugstore.com, presumably using borrowed money (see the convertible debt). What happens if drugstore.com doesn't deliver the payback Amazon expects? (Fabulous site, by the way; have you seen it? Unfortunately, there are other good drugstore sites, too.) thestreet.com Investors are building "castles in the sky" again. I just finished re-reading James O'Shaughnessy's 1996 book, "What works on Wall Street". He basically looked back at 43 years of proprietary S&P data to find out what investment strategies worked and what did not. He looked at 32 different strategies like PE, ROE, EPS, yield Capitalization, Price to book, PSR, rel strength etc. The 5 worst strategies were Low 1-yr relative str, High PSR, High price to Cash flow, High price to book, and in fifth from last High PE (all stocks). The 3 top return strategies were Low PSR (large cap), Low PE (Large cap) and ROE>15 (large cap). The bottom 5 earned much lower returns than Bonds for a much higher Sharpe Ratio (risk). It goes without saying that except for Low 1-yr rel. str, Internet stocks are priced near the extreme bottom of the study. History has shown that future returns on stocks priced like the internets are not rosy. I'll leave with a quote from Ben Graham, the Father of Security Analysis, a man whose opinion is little valued today. "People who habitually purchase common stocks at more than about 20 times their average earnings are likely to lose considerable money in the long run"

To: llamaphlegm who wrote (45106)	3/11/1999 6:43:00 AM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Respond to of 164684

llama, Thanks for reminder to not get carried away by exuberance. But at the moment,the current is going the long way.

To: llamaphlegm who wrote (45106)	3/11/1999 7:28:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

i realize that w/ glenn's conversion to amzn bull this is a very different board than it was a few months or even weeks ago ... but LP, I am not am AMZN bull. I am going with the momentum for now is all. Glenn