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Technology Stocks : IATV-ACTV Digital Convergence Software-HyperTV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Cohen who wrote (3806)	5/18/1999 1:21:00 PM
From: Mike Fredericks	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 13157

Stagger and Fredericks, you guys are now becoming irritating. I'd be complaining about compensation if it was just implimented, but it was implimented in 1992. No one seemed to bitch when the stock was going down and there was no compensation to be given based off of performance. 1) Guess you didn't read my post of around 11pm EST last night where I analyzed the 10Q in depth. Please read Message 9576460 and then feel free to respond to it. In this post I answered about 90% of my own questions regarding the compensation plan and am mostly satisfied that the compensation plan won't be a problem. 2) We didn't take a $3.4 Million charge vs. only $400K in revenues when the stock was going down. Frankly, I hadn't noticed this compensation plan until just the other day (when I read over the proxy stuff) 3) I'm sorry that you find factual discussion about possible downsides of the company to be irritating. I find them quite enlightening, especially when someone comes forward with facts (as opposed to opinions or guesses) that show that the downsides are not as bad as some may have thought. I like knowing the whole picture of a company I invest in. Too many times I have bought stock based on cusory DD and the "rah rah" opinions of other longs only to find that the longs had overlooked some major problems with the stock. My favorite example is ANCR, which I bought into at 22 after it fell from a tad over 40 in May-June of 1996. I think I sold the last of my stock at around 2 1/2. When the stock had run up, nobody seemed too interested in discussing the convertible preferred Reg S deal ANCR had struck... everyone's attitude was that if the stock had run up from ~4 to ~40 only to settle around 20, the company must be great because even after the 50% retracement the stock was still up 500% on the year. Moral: Just because a stock shoots up in price does not make it a good company. The discussions on this board where people post and discuss both positives and negatives about the company help me understand the company and the end result is that I feel more confident about the future prospects of the company and I can sleep easy at night knowing I own shares. When people resort to namecalling, the value of the board decreases, but there still is enough wheat amongst the chaff to make the board worthwhile daily reading for me. Let it go guys, look at the real news of TCI music being bought by Viacom thats huge for us. How? Please go into details. Did IATV have a press release stating that they had a deal with TCI music? The only thing I've seen from IATV recently is the TV Guide interactive and the Fox Sports stuff... but I certainly could have missed something... I would tell everyone on this board to ignore any more of the compensation situation as it really is ridiculous to continue. Ignoring a problem won't make it go away. Why are you so concerned about people examining the compensation situation in depth? The end result from my end is that I'm reasonably satisfied it's ok, but it took all that analyzing for me to get there. I'm not the type of person who takes things at face value. What if (hypothetical) all this digging had turned up that the execs were going to take these huge cash payments every quarter? Fortunately, that's not the case, but without all the digging around, some people on the thread may not have known that. Next time someone posts something that may be negative about the company, would you rather ignore it, or investigate it until you are satisfied that the negative is not really as negative as the original poster first thought? I'd prefer the latter myself. Remember, simply saying to a negative poster "The stock is up, thus you are wrong" is not accurate (refer back to ANCR, or IOM, or any of dozens of other stocks that are far far far below their all-time highs.) -Mike