The stockmarket performance is rather curious lately. The tech stocks, many of whom have negative earnings yet worth billions in the market keep soaring to new heights. Meanwhile the traditional bricks and mortar companies, who are profitable but not glamorous, are getting left behind in this latest round of insanity.

Proctor and Gamble is looking to acquire American Home Products and Warner Lambert for heaven's sake. The corporate landscape is littered with company's attempts to expand market share and tweak their direction by buying a sorta-kinda similar company.

I lived through one of those efforts when IBM bought ROLM in 1984. We did not have the market share or the infrastructure to boil the ocean in the IBM way. They figured we were another computer company. Yes we were, sort of. Yet we were profitable and had one hell of a product as well as a design leadership in a lot of areas. The fallout was and continues to be interesting

Hard to figure where to put the money these days. Sit on the sidelines and watch the show, or get in the game and play with fire.

And then there is oil...and gold... and the end of the first month is coming up so we can see if the big iron can reconcile all the data.

-- Nancy (wellsnl@hotmail.com), January 21, 2000

Answers

And a meteor could hit the earth next week, the sun could explode, a squirrel could chew through the phone lines, a car could smash into my electric pole, I could be killed by an attack of hungry birds, an earthquake could take out LA, yada yda yada.

Why keep worrying about all this shit?

-- (I'm@pol.ly), January 21, 2000.

Sure, right, "don't worry, be happy". Moron.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 21, 2000.

Saw a report on one ofthe news mags last night. It said a single share of Yahoo! Japan goes for over a MILLION BUCKS!!!! Makes our lil bubble look puny. They's some crazy folks buying that stuff.

Kook

-- Y2Kook (Y2Kook@usa.net), January 21, 2000.

I keep 3/4 of my bux in relatively safe places like TBills and money market. The rest I have in stocks, mostly tech stocks--S/W, wireless Internet. Just because a person doesn't approve of bubble.com doesn't mean they shouldn't participate--at least risk what you can afford to lose. I wish I'd bought some Biotech stocks

-- (Maria@Fart.aroma), January 21, 2000.

KOS:

Good response to the clueless idiot. The person obviously doesn't have a clue about stock market anomalies. I bet he's out buying shares of Rite Aid as we speak. Too funny.

-- haha (haha@haha.com), January 21, 2000.

Kook -

Don't know if the report you read mentions this, but they've intentionally kept the number of shares in Yahoo! Japan to a bare minimum to keep the price way high (and thus restrict it to major players).

-- DeeEmBee (macbeth1@pacbell.net), January 21, 2000.

King of Spain,

I see you have not given up your one word vocablulary.

haha What King of Spain called me.

-- (I'm@pol.ly), January 21, 2000.

I'm@pol.ly

I don't think you have to worry about being attacked and killed by hungry bird's.

-- ~***~ (~***~@earth.ebe), January 21, 2000.

What makes a poly hang out on a forum like this and spend hours telling other people not to worry?

-- just axin (axin@4sanity.com), January 21, 2000.

And yes, you can get killed by hungry birds. Ever seen a Buzzard circling a wounded cowboy in those Lone Ranger Shows??? They are extremely hungry.

I hang out here becasue I'm a paid shill of the sysops. They keep me around for entertainment purposes.

-- (I'm@pol.ly), January 21, 2000.

There's no mystery!

Tech stocks don't get their money from sources affected by interest rates. Dow stocks do!

-- James (brkthru@cableone.net), January 21, 2000.

Im@polly:

Nice clueless posts. Maybe someday you'll actually become intelligent enough to add something. But most of us aren't betting on it.

-- haha (haha@haha.com), January 21, 2000.

James -

Sounds like a little bit of "tech mythology", methinks. Techs are not immune to hikes in oil prices, and are mpst definitely not in the clear if the Fed has to bump up rates to cool oil-driven inflation. Simple example: Amazon (who may already be "selling dollars for 90 cents") would be quite seriously impacted if transportation (read "shipping") costs rise. Increases in operating costs would certainly hurt plenty of tech stocks.

-- DeeEmBee (macbeth1@pacbell.net), January 22, 2000.

The Dow closed at 11250 today, which is exactly where it was on May 13, 1999. Those stocks haven't made a dime in almost 9 months.

The American dream is gone. The traditional independent American business is nearly extinct, an endangered species that is either devoured or destroyed by the global mega-merger corporations. Gone are the days when a business would provide a hard-working productive man a job because he needed it to feed his family. Our fate is now in the hands of the ruthless multinationals.

Whether or not you remain employed is not based on your productivity, but on the percentage of "growth" that these corporations achieve. Mr. Dumbass CEO makes some bad decisions that cost the company millions, so the earnings don't quite live up to the growth projections that the greedy investors were hoping for. But does the CEO take responsibility for his incompetence? Hell no! To compensate for inferior management they merge companies together so that they can lay off 50,000 people, then watch those earnings bounce right back up! The stockholders LOVE it, as long as they aren't the ones getting laid off.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 22, 2000.