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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (8366)	3/17/1999 7:58:00 AM
From: dennis michael patterson	Respond to of 99985

There is an article on TheStreet.com site that says it all: RA is too bearish at bottoms and too bullish at tops. SOunds right to me!

To: Les H who wrote (8366)	3/17/1999 8:21:00 AM
From: Les H	Respond to of 99985

Iowa Couple Challenging Amazon.com By P. SOLOMON BANDA Associated Press Writer CEDAR FALLS, Iowa (AP) - Linda and Lyle Bowlin are mounting a modest challenge to bookselling giant Amazon.com - and demonstrating, perhaps, the democratic power of the Internet - from the comfort of their own home. ''There isn't a reason why anybody else out there can't open up a business on the Internet and be successful,'' says Bowlin, sitting in what used to be his dining room but now houses two computers and stacks of book orders. Since November 1997, Bowlin, formerly a grocery produce manager and now a professor of small-business development at the University of Northern Iowa, has been selling books over the Internet, first as a hobby that involved only self-help books, now as a business that supplies best sellers. Bowlin found he could buy from Amazon.com's same wholesalers for about the same price if he ordered at least five copies of the same book. And with his 18-year-old daughter doing the accounting, his wife doing the shipping and Bowlin managing the Internet site, their low overhead meant they could sell for less than Amazon.com. Recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman cited Bowlin's business - positively-you.com - as an testament to the power of the Internet and evidence that some Internet stocks are overvalued. ''There aren't 20,000 people who can produce software like Microsoft, but there are 20,000 who can set up bookstores or vitamin stores or video stores,'' Bowlin says. ''That's where the stock market missed the boat.'' Bowlin says his startup costs were about $2,500. Sales have grown from about $400 a month to $4,000 a day. Books lie in neat rows across the living room floor, boxes of padded mailing packages are stacked ceiling-high against a wall, and the coffee table doubles as a shipping table. ''This isn't my hobby, this is work,'' Mrs. Bowlin laments as she places books in mailing packages and slaps handwritten mailing labels on them. Analysts say it is difficult to say what Bowlin's success proves and what effect such businesses will have on big Internet stocks. But one analyst says it llustrates how the Internet allows almost anyone to compete with big, established businesses. ''When you're online, you are immediately a multinational company in the sense you have mulitnational reach,'' said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. ''But it also means that established companies have to take competition from places they never dreamed of and companies that perhaps did not exist a year ago.'' Bowlin's business volume is nowhere near Amazon.com's 1998 sales of $609 million and he admits that he alone will not compete head-to-head with the bookseller. But with an estimated $24 billion book market, there is plenty of room for others like himself, Bowlin says. ''There are about 5,000 independent booksellers out there and with a little extra investment they can be incredibly successful,'' Bowlin says. ''En masse, they pose a real threat.'' John Hooks, a computer systems and science professor at Pace University in New York, says Internet stock is not overvalued because it represents the expected earnings of the Internet of the future. Moreover, Hooks says, ''the buying public is not interested in transacting business with people they don't know. That's a large hurdle for mom-and-pop shops.'' Bowlin, who is also director of the Small Business Development Center at UNI, plans to hire people and move the business out of the house soon. He says he is weighing offers to go public that could quickly make him a millionaire. ''I'm an entrepreneur,'' Bowlin says. ''There's nothing wrong with that.''