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To: Jan Crawley who wrote (54524)	5/1/1999 7:23:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Column E-commerce and the milk door WILLIAM THORSELL 05/01/1999 The Globe and Mail Metro Page D6 All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights reserved. When I was a kid in beautiful suburban Edmonton, many houses had a little double door in the wall where the milkman left his daily delivery and took away the empties. Milk came in bottles then, with cream on the top under cardboard lids. Right into the late 1950s, horses pulled around the sweet-and-sour-smelling Silverwood's milk wagon. It was an early version of electronic commerce, except you used a rotary-dial telephone to place your weekly order and paid by leaving a few quarters with the empties on return. E-commerce was the hottest topic at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos this year, with packed seminar rooms listening to Jeffrey Bezos from Amazon .com and professors from California speak about the emerging global shopping mall. Mr. Bezos insisted that Amazon .com was actually profitable, but this happy fact was hidden by the enormous rate of investment in building markets and adding capacity. Like Japanese corporations, which used to insist that low profit margins financed growing market share and therefore fuelled big, offsetting capital gains, Amazon .com foresees continued operational losses on the way to fabulous stock valuations. Profit is almost a dirty word. (This is future-orientation taken to heights where bubbles sometimes burst.) This week, Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon .com's losses in the first quarter of 1999 rose to $61.7-million (U.S.) from $10.4-million in the same period last year. It was better than analysts expected; nevertheless, Amazon 's share price fell by 6.3 per cent on the news. True, the company's customer accounts grew from 2.3 million to 8.4 million over the year (which explains part of the increased loss), but some investors appear to be losing faith in the market-building, money-losing model on which Amazon .com and thousands of other Internet retailers are banking for success. A piece in The Wall Street Journal last Monday questioned Visa International's forecast of more than $1-trillion in E-commerce sales worldwide by 2003: "The growing list of customer complaints makes it clear that electronic commerce is tougher than expected. Customers can't find the product they want on the Web site, even though they know it's in the catalogue. Their credit card keeps getting rejected. The merchandise shows up a week late, and the shipping costs can be astronomical." Maybe E-commerce will ramp up as hyped, but there is room for doubt, especially for merchandise sales. Home delivery used to be much more common than it is today for a whole raft of things. On any given day the milkman was followed by the breadman, who was followed by the cleaners and the family doctor. Even gasoline used to be regularly delivered from the pump to the tank of your car by something called a "gas jockey," before the money-saving concept of self-serve escaped from the cafeteria to the service station, the bank and, now, the blood-pressure measuring machine in the drugstore (where you now have self-serve condoms, too). E-commerce retailing is predicated on a complete reversal of this trend -- a vast revival of home delivery for everything from furniture to X-rated videos, lingerie, books, pet food and, yes, milk. Amazon .com is reported to be in talks with an on-line grocery company. The drudgery of low-cost, self-serve shopping will soon be succeeded by the butler-economy, where legions of workers jump to Internet orders and bring the world to your door at lower cost because costly storefronts have disappeared. Well, maybe not. The prosaic aspects of E-commerce retailing attract no interest among Harvard professors or stock ana- lysts, but they are critical to the prospects for these companies. Amazon .com has hired 1,000 people over the past six months, and still has hundreds of unfilled jobs. Is it short of high-tech workers? No. The packaging and shipping departments are desperate for help as orders flow into warehouses. Then air and land delivery costs chew up the savings on E-commerce until the value of your order reaches a certain threshold. And finally there is the most prosaic problem of all: no little double-sided doors at home. Don't you groan when you find one of those colourful little tags on your door saying, "Sorry we missed you"? Someone has sent a parcel, and you weren't there. You are told to call during business hours and read out a long invoice number to locate the parcel, and then settle on a delivery time. Or you are asked to visit an inaccessible post office during business hours and bring in I.D. to sign for your parcel in an old notebook that a listless postal worker keeps under the counter at the end of a string. Milk, bread, shirts, shorts and chiffon, ordered on the Internet and flooding your door with little tags saying, "Sorry we missed you"? I think not. We will have to create an equivalent to the double-sided milk door before E-commerce can deliver the high-tech butler-economy that restores civilization to the pre-self-serve dignity of old. (You live long enough and someone thinks he actually invented something.) E-mail: wthorsell@globeandmail.ca

To: Jan Crawley who wrote (54524)	5/1/1999 8:36:00 PM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

Jan, Your points are all so valid. but the most important is this : 6. If you don't think that you have a good understanding of whats pushing/pulling the daily/short-terms swings, then don't play. The reason I said we're getting this down to a science, is that out of the last 30 trades for a couple of months now, only 5 were losers. Of course most of the trades were very small, but they add up. Especially when you don't let profits dribble away. With these trading profits, my ret trust was maxed out, and will have to roll it to IRA, where shorting is not allowed. Now I have to start fresh with a small personal account. I'll see whether the $22k to $101k in three months was a fluke, or a something more systematic. This time I'm starting with $24k. One thing for sure, the last $10k was like pulling teeth. That yhoo was very stubborn.