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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (30758)	6/1/1999 4:12:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 70976

Skeeter: Re: yes, i guess the internuts are being subsidized - in a way... the subsidizers just don't know it yet... ;-) Yes Sir you got it! One day these free-wheeling-buy-at-any-price-on- the-IPO-open types will learn that dreams alone don't make sustainable businesses - show me Free Cash Flow or atleast some +ve numbers in operational cash flow or show me the door. My biggest problem has been trying to decide if any of them can make it past a few years without either going belly up or having some gentle giant like ATHM pay for some smaller 2 bit player like Excite with vastly overinflated currencies. If I can't see a company surviving in some way shape or form a few years down the road it is difficult for me to pull the trigger. C'est la vie. The other thing about the nets is that it highlights what can happen when people want something badly. Last summer I was on the other side of the coin when liquidity in the small caps just vanished. That was a ghastly feeling - when your stocks went down huge on minor volume AND stayed down there for a long long time. Someone said that what's different this time is that people 'believe' in equities. I think there is some truth to this. Buying an equity is taking a risk. If the years before had proven that such risk taking was a bad course of action (meaning trailing returns sucked) it is understandable that the money will tend to stay away from equities. We have been a bit lucky to say the least. Since 1982 sky's the limit. Buy the dips has worked. Demographics are in our favor. Restructurings seem to have worked. The Japanese tumbled (demographics worked the reverse way for them). Social Security blah. We have not had the unfortunate experience of living through depressions or the like. Our internal, societal risk assessments have concluded that equities are worth some risk. Then of course the smart people decide that if some risk is good more is better. Let's all buy Internets. OK. Still this is a game and the game may begin again this month. I elect to pass.