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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (21340)4/11/1999 4:20:00 AM
From: Dorine Essey  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 27307
 
Happy Easter to all our Orthodox friends

www2.bluemountain.com



To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (21340)4/11/1999 7:29:00 AM
From: Venditâ„¢  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 27307
 
Dave this is a thread I have bookmarked. I rarely post there but I do follow it. I think you will find it interesting because it is mainly comprised of analysts who are trying to understand why the web stocks
have amassed such large valuations.

Chuzzlewit is a professional and is using the thread to come up with a formula for valuing these stocks.

Subject 25419

Vendit



To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (21340)4/11/1999 10:04:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 27307
 
What Yahoo has created can be duplicated (except perhaps for the name recognition) for
far less than $500,000,000. This for a company with a market cap well in excess of
$30B. Think about that, should Yahoo begin to seriously move in a direction of earnings
to justify it's valuation, anybody can enter this market to cash in themselves, many with
financial resources far superior to those available to Yahoo. Think about Snap.com
(NBC/GE), Go.com (ABC/Disney), MSN.com (Microsoft).


Dave,

I am far from an internet bull at present valuations although I do own some internet stocks. I do not own YHOO at this time. I understand your doubting the valuation of YHOO. I was wondering how much you believe the trade name "Yahoo" is worth presently. That is a factor to be considered in valuating YHOO.

Glenn



To: Dave Mansfield who wrote (21340)4/12/1999 3:48:00 PM
From: Greater Fool  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 27307
 
>90% gross margins attracts competitors, believe me. I question if the 90% gross margins spoken of so many times are real or manufactured.

Dave, I'm a long time reader and first time poster. I've read with interest your posts for some time. Here goes with mine:

High gross margins don't indicate much more than the product being sold doesn't cost much to make. Doesn't tell you anything about whether it's a good business to be in.

Microsoft has high gross margins, Wal-Mart and Home Depot have low gross margins. All are great businesses. It makes sense to me that Yahoo has high gross margins, as all they are paying for are their net connections and their servers.

Now high net profits after tax matter a lot more. Yahoo's funny-money "pro forma" profits are 29% last quarter, down from 33% the quarter before. Their real profits were 19%, down from 24% last quarter. These are admirable profits, but Yahoo will have to keep these profit margins at a much larger scale to justify their market cap. The only companies that have profit margins like this at large scales are unregulated near monopolies like Microsoft and Intel. No way will profits like these at a large scale not attract incredible competition.

I saw one valuation justification for Yahoo hoping for cash flow 80-90% of revenue when Yahoo is a $billion (rev) company in 2001. I don't think there's been a company in the history of capitalism that's sustained 80% net profits.

But this market isn't about justified valuations. It's about greater fools. Different parameters than valuation count here, such as: How much of the nation's (or world's) wealth is in the equity markets? How much could that quantity of money invested increase by? Based on this, I can't discount the idea of a Dow at 20,000 -- and Yahoo at 500. Investors in this market have also displayed a great deal of resilience, so I don't see any reason to think they'll pull the money out until they want to spend it. Overall this will begin to happen in a big way about ten or twenty years from now as the overall population begins to gray. The stock market has become like a giant bank, and I don't see any reason people will withdraw their savings until they need them.

The bulls on these threads intuitively understand this, and that's why they don't listen to any arguments about valuation. They don't listen because they know it doesn't count any more.

Yahoo's valuation stopped being rational past about $1 Billion. Once it became disconnected from rationality, there was and is little stopping it from becoming a $100 Billion company. There are only two things I can think of: All the insider shares, such as Softbank's, and the flood of IPO's. Each of these will whittle away at the stock price.