Word: ebayers
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...Warren Buffett left billions of dollars on the table by never splitting the stock of his company? It sure seems that way. In the past few weeks, dozens of firms from Internet darling eBay to Xerox to Microsoft have announced splits and watched their stocks soar. Last week athletic-shoe company K-Swiss joined the fun by announcing healthy earnings and a 2-for-1 split. Its shares jumped 23%. To the same point, when Cisco Systems on Feb. 2 posted earnings that beat Wall Street estimates but failed to declare an expected stock split, its shares dropped...
...stock more affordable for small investors, who like to buy in round lots of, say, 100 shares. That's one reason stocks that split have historically got about a 5% lift between the date of the announcement and the actual split. Lately, though, the pop has been more explosive. EBay rose a quick 37%; Xerox, 10%; Microsoft, 12%. People now pay for services that alert them via pager or e-mail whenever a split is announced, so they can quickly buy the stock. It's an example of lemmings running amuck in the market--dumb money chasing any trend that...
Amazon.com the money-losing online book-seller whose market value now greatly exceeds that of Sears, may be the most outrageous example of Internet speculation. But it has plenty of company inside the bubble. Online auctioneer eBay, trading publicly only since September, is up tenfold and is now six times as big as venerable bricks-and-mortar auction house Sotheby's. Without question, Internet stocks are the hottest things since biotechnology shares soared in 1991 (and crashed in 1992), and may be the hottest things since the Dutch tulip-bulb craze in the 1600s...
...main risk in selling short is that your potential losses are unlimited. There is no telling how high a stock will go. If you had sold short 100 shares of eBay just a month ago, you would have a paper loss today of $12,000. Professionals have lost hundreds of millions betting against Net mania. Compounding the problem, Net stocks have relatively few shares in circulation, and that makes them difficult to borrow and sell. The ones you would want to short--those without earnings or a compelling business plan--are precisely the ones whose shares are hardest to borrow...
Patent disputes are erupting over online auctions just as they emerge as a killer app for sites such as Ebay and Onsale. The latest conflict pits comer Priceline.com against a Virginia inventor who claims he got to the patent office a year and a half earlier. MORE...