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Technology Stocks : OnSale Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Wisdom who wrote (4061)	4/12/1999 7:51:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 4903

No. eBay and other Internet stocks are bid up on a dream of what the Internet will become - you know, "virtual" things. Things like patents or earnings are too real to be considered important. I do think that the Internet stocks will go down a lot by this summer. But they will go back up in the Fall, probably even higher than they are going now. So shorting them for the next year or two will be risky. The premise eBay is bid up on is that online auctions will grow to a multi-billion dollar business within a few years. Maybe several tens of billions. OnSales's patent doesn't change that. Speculators in the auction stocks can rightly argue "so what if eBay has to pay 5% (my plug figure) to OnSale, it's not 5% of the gross sales at the site but only 5% of what we Ebay takes in themselves." I don't know if OnSale will seek roylaties or some other arrangement. Technically they could try to close down the infringing auction sites but that is extremely unlikely to happen - the courts tend not to allow gross restraint of trade in a general merchandizing area.