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Non-Tech : Barnes & Noble (BKS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane Hall-Witt who wrote (1229)	5/17/1999 10:07:00 PM
From: Lane Hall-Witt	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1691

Here's an interesting post on the price pegging some of us have talked about with BKS, from the Yahoo! thread. I don't know if he's right, but it's similar to the viewpoint I've supported here. post.messages.yahoo.com I am neither short nor long on this stock, but that will change tomorrow. I don't know how many of you really follow stocks, and watch them tick for tick, but here is some analysis that you might find interesting. Between the hours of 3:00pm and 4:00pm est., BKS was under what is called a "controlled" price. This has happened quite often the past two weeks. To give you a general idea; you may have noticed that the price jumped to $33 7/16th, but then someone jumped in with a rather large size (shares) on the ask (12600) - and the bid was lowered to $33 1/8th with (200 shares). The priced dropped, and the ask was lowered to $33 3/8 with the same number of shares available. The same thing happen at $33 1/4 and $33 3/1th and $33 1/8th - all with the same shares. At some point, the number actually grew even though 48000 shares were bought at the ask. Now, you say "so what" - well, the sell order for these "mythical" shares were never completed or offered. The point being, that as soon as the price was offered, the shares were removed and offered at a lower price. This lasted for 25 minutes. Now, no person could move this quickly, and in many instances, it is the beginning of a controlled price "break out". I have seen this about 2 dozen times in the past 6 months with some stocks....they were AOL, ONSL, IBM, ZD, LU, CSCO - to name a few. What does this mean? Someone or something is controlling price increases. The only way to do this, is to catch the stock at a break in volume. Can't be done with stocks like AOL, CSCO, etc. Think again. The postive for you investors in BKS? You should start seeing a rather swift climb soon. Next time you have the chance to watch each buy and sell, check out the ask size. Not so much the actual size, but the buys that come in and what happens to a NYSE stock when these buys come in. I will be joining you come tomorrow. I suspect there is a reason for the price control, and sooner or later, it will come to an end. Good luck!

To: Lane Hall-Witt who wrote (1229)	5/17/1999 10:44:00 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Respond to of 1691

Your analysis ties into the calculations at: Message 9431178 That analysis benchmarked the BKS bricks and mortar against BGP and came up with a valuation for the bricks and mortar in the $19-20 range. I'm beginning to think that BGP may actually be undervalued. It has a 52 week high of 41 1/2 and an impressive track record. The implosion of their stock price was not caused by a poor performance but is more related to the perception that they do not have a successfully thought out strategy for the Internet. Check their results for the last five years: Operating profits for the years ending January 31, 1999: $167.3 MM 1998: $138.0 MM 1997: $103.1 MM 1996: $ 64.5 MM 1995: $ 50.2 MM BKS and BGP continue to aggressively add more stores, and even though sales in the book industry are flat, BKS, BGP and AMZN continue to grow at the expense of the smaller independent stores. My point is that we may actually be undervaluing the bricks and mortar for both BGP and BKS. I am also beginning to think that it is going to be difficult for BNBN to sustain a price in excess of $40 per share. At that price, BNBN would have a market cap equal to approximately 25% of the AMZN market cap, yet their sales for the first quarter were equal to only 11% of AMZN's sales. At this point, BNBN is an also ran to AMZN in the book business and suffers from a lack of diversity in its product offerings.