Slashdot Mirror
Tech Stocks Tumble
For the first time I'm posting a story that I consider completely offtopic for Slashdot: I'm sick of the insulting e-mails, the derogatory namecalling, and the all-in-all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy. I consider stories about the stock market to be CNNfn or CNBCs thing. We only bring up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in, not when the story is "The Market." But here it is. Over the last week, the US Stock Market dropped like a stone through kleenex. I don't really know what to say about it: what I know, and in fact my interest in the Stock Market can fill a shotglass, but I'm sure there are many readers with opinions on the subject (including an especially huge black conspiracy perpetrated by Slashdot to hide the "Truth" about something that I simply consider offtopic and uninteresting).
That is an impressive show of being pissed off
by CmdrTaco. I guess it got to him.
Stock Market is a non-story to me as well.
I don't think it should be commented on by slashdot either!
This is one of the first Slashdot articles in a while that I've actually felt like I could have nothing to contribute if I wanted to spend the time, because it simply doesn't raise any issues.
:)
:)
I don't think it's a coincidence that this is "offtopic" for Slashdot and completely boring at the same time.. hehe.
Thus, I think Slashdot's typical range of "on-topic" subjects are just about right on and something like this shouldn't be accepted to the pool of accepted topics on Slashdot.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
I would suggest that, given that Linux's credibility in the business world is a direct function of RHAT and LNUX prices (which I don't agree with, but there you go), we need to be discussing this. This is more on-topic than any of Jon Katz's ramblings.
I'm sorry if you lost money. A lot of us lost money. That doesn't make Linux any less viable, it doesn't affect the GPL, but it is worthy of discussion.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
The vast (90+%) majority of slashdotters don't post or email their opinions, and I'd bet they're generally happy with Mr. Taco's choices of what fits into "News for Nerds"...
I'd hate to see the site altered to fit the 3% loudest readers.
I quite agree that stock market news (or sports results, or how to molest chickens for fun and profit) do not belong on slashdot; there are several thousand sites out there already with everything from quotes from markets all over the world, to commentary, to astrological market forecasts.
In general, i feel there is only a point in posting non-tech stories if there is a valid "geek angle" to it, something about the story that the slashdot crowd can appreciate. The stock market in general doesn't qualify.
JMHO,
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Question for discussion:
How do you think the market downturn will affect recent entrants like Linux based stocks? Some analysts have commented that the market is cooling to Linux... Thoughts?
I am not one of the forces that suggested/demanded a story about the stock market, but I feel that if Commander Taco feels so strongly about it, then this discussion that I am taking part in should not occur.
I totally agree that discussions about the stock market in general do not belong on Slashdot. There are hundreds of websites that are dedicated to that. Actually, I think the IPO coverage that Slashdot has right now is extraneous.
On that note (and perhaps offtopic), I wonder if there is a formal system to moderate the topics themselves. Readers/moderators can currently state there opinions about postings (MODERATE THIS UP!), but I'm not aware of a system to moderate the topics other than posting, "THIS TOPIC SUCKS... FIRST POST"
Just something to Consider...
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Do you believe?
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Oh, for fsck's sake, who gives a damn? If the man says that he has no interest in the stock market, why is it so hard for you to take his word for it? For a lot of people in this industry, money is not the reason they're doing this.
Do you honestly believe that Gates is doing this for money anymore? Why bother? Most of the sucessful computer-geek types that I've seen so far have done this because they enjoy the field, they like working with computers. They honestly enjoy their jobs, and would do this for fractions of their salary.
Yes, recently the suits have moved in, but it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a stuffed suit and a true geek. Try it some time.
(flame off)
Forget the whole market.. focus on the companies often discussed:
m l?tag=st.ne.1430735..1003-200-1697624
RHAT: Red Hat
LNUX: VA Linux Systems
CALD: Caldera
ANDN: Andover.net
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1697624.ht
Title of the CNet story: "Sour market pushes Linux stocks below IPO prices"
I have to agree that most people here probably have no interest in a story about market swings, however volitile. It has been covered to death elsewhere.
I have stock invested, and I really don't care - the market will go up again, just as it has gone down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was wondering how long the tech. stock lunacy would go on. As somebody who holds a little bit of stock in a profitable brick-and-morter retailer, this is kind of gratifying. It was getting really annoying to see these outrageous valuations for money-losing companies.
I'm even kind of glad that the Linux stocks have returned to sanity. It's pretty clear that Linux will continue to grow exponentially over the next few years. It's not at all clear where and how much money will be made in the market.
RedHat, for example, will never be the cash cow that Microsoft was in the '90s. Even if they get 90% of the OS market, they'll never have the outrageous margins that MS had/has. The Open-Source model just won't support it. I'm positive they'll turn into a strong, profitable company, but that it's anybody's guess whether they will be a profitable $20M company or a profitable $20B company.
It's entirely possible that the big bucks in the Linux market will be made by companies like IBM, SGI, and SCO. It's just too early to tell how it will turn out.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
While I would not go so far as to accuse CmdrTaco of a conspiracy (at least on this issue), there may actually be a story here which could impact a large chunk of us.
/.ers should be prepared, however, for the coming mergers and cost-cutting measures by just about every tech company out there.
No one disputes that there are many technology stocks which are over-valued for their revenue. Fund managers have been forced into adopting a scheme of investing ahead of reason in order to maintain a competitive edge. Now the bottom has dropped out of a lot of these stocks and Linux is not immune.
Think of the benefits that you personally have received from the large amounts of money invested in tech stocks. Since open-source-based companies give their products away, if they have more money for more developers (full-time) then if you use their products, you have benefited. I do not dispute that even without money, Linux development will continue and continue to accelerate. The extra cash that these companies had on hand was just glycerine on the fire.
This will determine if the commercial interests in Linux are really just a flash in the pan, or here to stay.. What worries me is that it looks more and more to be a flash in the pan..
A perfect example would be, sorry to say it, LNUX, Aka, VA Linux. Their stock will now end up having whole chapters devoted to it. It was the most spectacular rise AND fall of a stock ever.. From over 320$ opening day, to a little over 20. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's undervalued. I think, at the moment, it *IS* a 20$ stock.
This is where the pain is going to start to set in, and we shall all see if these companies will thrive, or start stabbing eachother in the back.. They have shareholders to answer to now. One could argue that releasing things publically instead of holding them as proprietary isn't in the best interest of the shareholders..
Stocks are about greed. No one ever bought a stock becouse of morals, or to better the community. They buy it becouse they believe that it will make them money..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
> I'm sick of the insulting emails, the deregotory namecalling, and the all in all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy.
OK.. so if i've deciphered your rant correctly, the problem is that you failed to post a story saying "the stock market is falling".. and so people got angry, assumed you had some nefarious reasons for not posting said story, and flamed you. So you, just to make these people shut up, are posting a story saying "the stock market is falling".
I find that kind of funny.
because while i obviously haven't seen your personal email and don't know what's in it, i _have_ been reading slashdot postings.. and for the last couple weeks i've actually seen a bunch of flame postings saying there is TOO MUCH coverage of stock/financial/business-related-money issues on slashdot! As in, people who see periodic announcements about commercial businesses going public or having things happen to them, and thus assume that Andover has turned slashdot into some kind of CNNfn workalike.
These people are probably going to be tearing their hair out over the story you just posted.
Taco: no matter what you do, people are going to get pissed off. There is nothing you can DO about this. People in general suck. For some reason slashdot readers in particular if they see something they don't care to read about, they seem to be unable to just not read it and move on with their lives. No, they have to post flame crap saying "this shouldn't have been written". And of course that works in reverse too, as you well know.
You can't please these people NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. So why try?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Are we beginning to see the (finally!) ridiculous valuation of all these $&#*(! net stocks? I mean, I think the net is a pretty big deal, too, but geez!
Why have all these companies like Amazon been valued so high? because they are building brand awareness? I think that's a bunch of crap. I just don't see brand being as important 5 years from now. The Internet is diluting brand. I don't give a crap about brand when I go to buy a book. I care about price, which is why I go to cheapbooks and let it find the best price for me.
See, how important is brand when your brand can be co-opted. All the "branding, marketing" stuff on your site can be bypassed by an index site (like cheapbooks). Or by Pricewatch. or whatever. Who gives a crap about brand when I can get good, hard data on what that thingee really does? I happen to like the Wrox press computer books, but do I seek 'em out? No. I read user reviews on Amazon/B&N/Fatbrain, find the book I want, then fire it into cheapbooks.
anyway, Rant off, but I think the tech stocks were ridiculously overvalued and them falling is good. That being said, there is SO much money pouring into the market these days as everyone pumps money into mutual funds, that the market will rebound. Because the money will keep flowing in. What are you gonna do? Buy bonds?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
When you don't investigate EVERY company you want to buy stock in, it's a gamble. These gambling day traders, trying to hop on the next big IPO inflated the market so much, that a huge correction was going to happen.
I don't feel sorry for the people that lost thier shirt one bit. People that invested in "dotcom" stocks that never had any good business plan, never any proftis, never any THOUGHT of profits, just some spiffy URL, deserved what they got when the bottom fell out. And for the people that lost big on Microsoft. If you couldn't see this drop coming months ago, you also deserved to lose what you did. A fool and their money are soon parted.
What happened was, these day traders started to realize that when the ruling came out, and these companies that depended on Microsoft started to drop with Microsoft, they realized that the market isn't some sort of game anymore, where their account balance was bragged about like a high score on Galaga. Those numbers they saw on e-trade, etc. was their retirement going down the shitter, and it scared the hell out of them. So the same jabronis that inflated the market with idiot buying, took it back down with idiot selling.
So I say good for them, maybe now they will realize that trading is just not hopping on the next big thing, and gambling your money away. It's something left to people that know every little company like the back of their hand, the brokers. If brokerage fees are something you have to worry about, you shoulnd't be in the market to begin with.
Well, I just typed in a great big long thing and before I submitted it I read a bunch of the comments about not commenting. All of them are right.
But, at the same time I think I can sum up the tech stock drop: Stupid people are investing in tech stocks.
It's as simple as that.
You are truely living in a sheltered world. Tell me, who provides you with your food, you internet access, your gas? I'm willing to bet it's a company. I bet you even WORK for a company, don't you? Did some non profit orginization make your computer and it's components? I doubt it.
Money that leaves the stock market goes into other things, don't fool yourself. Rarely is money liquidated from the market. It's simply moved over to bonds, and lower risk factor investments, such as gold, silver, etc. Heck, much of it will also go into overseas bank acounts to sit and earn interest.
Companies getting hurt directly affects everyone. I'd like to point out that nearly every major recession woldwide has been preceeded by a dramatic loss in the stock market.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
And of course, the infamous area 32767, where all positive numbers slip into the negative universe.
Fight Spammers!
When are people going to start blaming Netscape, like they rightfully should? I don't recall them ever making it into the black -- no wonder they went from boom to bust in about four years!
The Netscape IPO was the second (or third) California Gold Rush. There were stories of instant millionaires, and the tech-savvy who could make it there discovered it easy to find financing from people who couldn't get there themselves, but had seen and heard of this gold, and wanted a cut of it for themselves. Sure, there was gold, but most people couldn't make it profitable enough. Surprise, surprise, they went broke.
Anyway, it should come as no surprise that tech stocks are helping to drive down the market. Profitable companies like M$ are in legal trouble, while dot-coms and Linux outfits have not been making money from the get go -- sure sounds like a losing combo to me.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Ok. So you're not interested in the stock market, don't know anything about it, and don't feel like reading about it. Personally, I could care less about Quake and really don't feel like reading whatever Carmack has to say this week. Someone else out there is maybe sick of some other topic or topics that run on Slashdot from time to time.
But the fact of the matter is that Slashdot has become a large and diverse community site -- bigger than I think the creators of the site intended, and certainly beyond what they can really control now. (Hello first posters, gritty pants people, and other trolls).
The fact of the matter is that the stock collapse is an important story, even if you don't feel like reading about it. The stock market of the 90s has been very bizarre, growing in value far beyond the ability of corporations to repay the investment, and it had to be obvious that something had to give eventually. If the market falls by half over the coming days and weeks, that will restore sanity and long term stability, but at the same time it will hurt a whole lot of people. The parallels between the 20s leading up to 1929's crash and the 90s leading up to this (or else, if we recover from this now, a bigger and more permanent crash that I for one think is inevitable and not too far off on the horizon) are striking and certainly at least as newsworthy as a frickin' video game console and it's possible hard drive.
I have a hard time sympathizing with you on this one, CmdrTaco. You don't think this is interesting, yeah, well, fine. But a lot of other people surely do, and if this "community site" is to remain relevant to "the community", you must be willing to run stories that interest them as well as yourself.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
If I want general, up-to-date news on the stock market, I have cable. I'll turn on CNBC. And allegedly some of the newsstands around here carry the Wall Street Journal. Slashdot is neither of these. That isn't central to it. To try to carry a story every day with the previous day's closing on all the stocks of interest to Slashdotters would detract from the character of Slashdot. However, running stories about the IPO behavior of Open Source companies and to track them from time to time is appropriate. It is a part of what those companies are. It can effect how they act.
For the stock market addicted, I suggest that Slashdot could offer a Slashbox that provides the latest quotes for the stocks of companies that Slashdot often runs stories about. Obviously any Open Source company would make the list. But Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and IBM get mentioned often enough to make the list. One of the greatest strengths of Slashdot is its configurability. Let the people who want the quotes get them.
As for the people who never want financial news, go customize your Slashdot homepage to exclude stories about "The Almighty Buck". And a note to Slashdot. It is a challenge to find it. I could understand alphabetizing it under "Almighty", "Buck" or even "The", but it seems to be alphabetized under "Mighty" perhaps to put it right under "Microsoft".
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
anyone see how AMD actually had a profit? (US$1.16/share).
Sheesh! Don't you know how to write a conspiracy theory?? The Jewish bankers are *purposely* depressing the stock price so the Christians will sell off. Monday they start buying again, and the stupid Christians say "OHMYGOD, why did I sell".
Now *that's* a proper conspiracy theory. Oh, no, wait, you have to throw something in about CmdrTaco's hidden Jewish/Armenian ancestry, and how he hates the Turks. Oh, and he has a mole in the center of his back, which is a mark of his genetic manipulation. All of HIS people have the same mole. Irrelevent details improve the plausibility -- nobody would make these things up, y'see.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
So this is probably not "News for Nerds" but it is, IMHO, "Stuff that matters", maybe not to be discussed on a daily basis but interesting still.
/.-worthy because tech companies participate in it, specially and more recently, Linux-related ones. And, as other posters have pointed out, there's been plenty of IPO related stories on /. So, CmdrTaco says that the Market is of no interest but the companies performing in it are, my point is that you can't separate them: simplifying, the Market is the companies is the Market.
/. And every piece that we can gather to understand our society is "stuff that matters"
You see, the Market is not just one thing, it's just a name we use to refer to a large group of economical phenomenoms in which participate millions of people, whether individually or organized on companies, unions, consulting firms or whatever. So, I would dare to say that the Market is
On the other hand, this overdependence on the Market to me is interesting if not creepy. There's too much speculation which is not bad by itself but becomes dangerous when it has no real foundations. So VA Linux has a huge IPO, but is (was) the company so valuable? Of course not; there's a lot of hype affecting the investors decisions, this is not a perfect free market. Come on, there's even people saying that the Market has been behaving so irrationally lately because too many people are taking Prozac on a regular basis so they don't measure risk well. The point is that the behavior and structure of "The Market" (and the discussion about it) say a lot about our society, specially about our means of productions and development, our individual and collective goals and our ways to apply technology to get to them. This is as relevant as the Govt. policies that have been discussed here at
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
I think you should write a book on the interactions between short term intrabank lending interest rate target policy and equity market fluctuations. Really, I mean your thesis is soooo original that I'm sure that millions of lemmings, err, I mean investors, will buy your work and you'll make a ton of money. Sarcasm aside, the increase in the CPI is miminal and considerably below long term trend lines. In all probability, it represents the higher energy prices caused by the supply deficit in petroleum products. The Fed usually does not consider the CPI as a major precusor of real inflation; as an indicator, it is rather insensitive and tends to be lagging, rather than leading. The CPI is one of many factors that are considered, ranging from PPI to margin percentages to structural unemployment indexes. Even if the Fed were to raise interest rates, as they have done so repeatedly in the past, it is unreasonable to project causation vis a vis the fall in stock prices into what may be correlation. Not to mention that recently the market has not reacted strongly to interest rate changes (so there goes correlation as well)...
1 Cisco Eclipses Microsoft As 'Most Valuable Company' by timothy on 02:07 PM -- Sunday March 26 2000 CST 249
2 3Com Spinning Off US Robotics by Hemos on 08:15 AM -- Tuesday March 21 2000 CST 80
3 Net Firms Running Out Of Cash? by Hemos on 10:57 PM -- Monday March 20 2000 CST 197
4 The Implications Of Knowledge Work by timothy on 02:43 AM -- Monday March 20 2000 CST 139
5 Secrets of Software Success: Management Insights from 100 Software Firms by Hemos on 09:40 AM -- Thursday February 24 2000 CST 71
6 What are Share Options Worth? by Cliff on 06:37 AM -- Saturday January 15 2000 CST 126
7 What's the Best Online Financial Solution? by Cliff on 01:25 PM -- Wednesday January 05 2000 CST 151
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The crash of '29 was absolutely real, whichever way you look at it - it was not some statistical anomaly created by choice of DJIA component stocks.
Some of the hardest hit stocks in the '29 crash were the "Nifty Fifty", which were the 50 most respected blue chip growth stocks of the day (i.e. the Home Depot and Cisco's). These stocks grew to have huge P/Es as everyone believed their growth rates deserved it. During the crash, these stocks fell 90-95% or more.
The '29 crash also marked the end of the prosperous "Roaring 20's", and gave rise to the ensuing depression.
FYI the NASDAQ drop, so far, from the 5000+ peak to fridays 3300 close is around 35%, which is more than the "Black Monday" drop. Last week's decline alone was around 25% - the same as Black Monday.
There are still many stocks selling at historicaly absurd prices, so the carnage is likely not over yet. We may get a sucker/technical rally sometime soon, but IMO we havn't seen the NASDAQ bottom yet.
This is not a news site. This is CmdrTaco's sandbox. The reason slashdot is interesting is that most of the time, most of what he considers interesting, *I* consider interesting. That doesn't mean that he has to publish everything that I might consider interesting, or even publish everything that he has an interest in.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A lot of people here are talking about how Linux was overvalued or how Techs were overvalued. I hate to break it to you, but that's a very nearsighted point-of-view. The reality is that the Market was overvalued and the Market corrected.
The good news is that technology stocks weren't strong because it was a fad. Technology stocks were strong because there was a ton of money coming into the market trying to take advantage of what is obviously a major shift in the way humans interact with eachother and in the infrastructure required to do it. That sort of upheval is what leads to frontier markets like the international trade situation after WWII or the gold-rush (which was not so much about gold as it was about settling half of a continent, in terms of investment and return).
This period of history will have its winners and its loosers, but I don't think that this correction will signal the last run-up or the last drop. We're in for a wild and bumpy ride for at least the next five years.
Note to Taco: you should be interested. The stock market is perhaps the single capitolist endevor that most resembles open-source, and as such it tends to demonstrate a lot of the pit-falls that we have to look forward to. How so? Well, can you think of another example where total disclosure is made, value is assessed simply on results, and each new endevor is free to use the same tactics demonstrated by earlier projects? The businesses themselves are nothing like Open Source, but if you think of each stock as a project on its own....
Or at least pix of CmdrTaco touring the riot area in Roblimo's limo.
Now now cmdrtaco let's deal with some reality here not the fanatsy world you live in. Althou your interest in the stock market could fill a shot glass the stock market affects you and what you do in this industry. The stock market is more than nasdaq and M$ and the new linux stocks. The market involves all the pieces parts that go into the very computer you are working on right down to the petrolum by product that makes the boards that all those chips, resistors and other gizmos get soldered to. And that can have a dramitic effect on price, supply and demand at it's finest. The program code for linux may be free but the parts for your motherboard are not. Not only that the perphials for linux aren't free either I belive that Corel office price will be about $199 dollars. Guess what it had better sell or Corel will have problems. And althou you may not pay attention to it a lot of people do their pay is directly affected by it. It is true that \ . is not a stock market news service, but to completly diss on it is just shows a true lack of judgement in the real world. \ . is under no obligation to report what it doesn't want to there are plenty of other web sites out there to inform ppl. But don't your advertisers want to know what kind of traffic hits \ . so they can see if their product will get an audience or maybe this is all completly free and nobody charges you for the bandwidth your using.
It pains me to see a topic posted the way it was. I constantly see people posting about not wanting the word geek be some all encompassing thing that results in the stereo-typing of /. readers. Us geeks come from all walks of life - from bio-chem geeks to anime otaku. So why must all the topics that are deemed "relavent" be limited strictly to what tech geeks and those who think linux is the answer to all of life's mystries (the real answer is 42)?
I am not saying that i hate linux (i use it). What i am saying is that the editors should give more thought into what the readers are interested and not just what linux-geeks are interested. I am afraid to think of what has Not made it to slashdot because of the discriminatory attitude such editors as cmdrtaco seem to display as evidant in his posting.
The stock market in all its forms should be relavent. It forms the very basis of the economy and therefore are lives. Tech stocks or not!
The biggest deal in the world these days has been the insane amounts of cash being generated by tech stocks, funding tens of thousands of startups, internet divisions of large corporations, everything to do with the internet, including the new success of our beloved Linux and BSD OSes and the long awaited stumbling of Microsoft. If the condition of the stock market changes then the nature of the entire technology profession as a whole will change as well. Its certainly a much more pertinent story to all our lives than things like this.
The obvious conflict of interest is the significant monetary connection that exists between the editors and writers of Slashdot.org and their corporate owners, VA Linux. And CmdrTaco's rant right on the front page is the greatest example I have ever seen of abusing a prominent and important public platform to whine about a personal situation that is his own fault anyway, and it can only further tarnish the image of Slashdot in the eyes of the greater technical and financial communities and hasten its journey towards complete irrelevance.
Personally I think anybody who sent Mr. Taco any nasty email accusing him of some stupid conspiracy is a MORON.
.com hype.
But either way, IMHO, the stock market is "stuff that matters". It would be better if he said it matters, but slashdot isn't going to be any sort of stockmarket ticker machine.
Mind you, the US economy plays a global roll. It didn't in 1929, but does now. Allthough the market drop wasn't significant enough, it is important. The world felt it in '87, and when Ronald Reagan fucked around with shit the world felt it as well (especially germany, and other euro countries).
What have we learned from this? A company that doesn't expect to produce any profit for the next 3 years might not be worth $300/share. IMHO I'm a bit glad it happend since it got rid of the big
As for my investments, my Lucent stock has been hurting, my AT&T is somewhat stable, My Sun stock is doing A LOT WORSE THEN IT SHOULD BE! God damn, sun turns out above everyones expectations and STILL loses points. Oh well, thank GOD I don't have a retirement fund or something tied up in it. And i'm sure they'll rebound in a few months anyway.
Well, cheers.
It is physically impossible for any website that offers free posting of ideas and comments, even to AC's, to host a shadow conspiracy on any topic. Slashdot by design is inherently immune to conspiracy provided they never start deleting posts. (And if they did, the outcry would be so large that this is inherently impossible for them to do.)
I've seen the trolls crying foul over this tech stock issue, and all I can say is that I support you, CmdrTaco, this might be of interest to some, but if the editors don't think it's important, then it really doesn't need to get posted. It's up to the editors of a site to determine what direction the content of the site should take.
If you trolls want to whine about what's not on Slashdot, then kindly unstuff linux from your ass, take the Slash source that is freely available, ask mommy for your $70 registration fee, register stockdot.org, and put up your own damn site. Then you can tell all your little troll friends about all the Wall Street conspiracies and VA Linux plots to storm Redmond with assault rifles and whatever else you can come up with.
...about this current situation, IMHO, is that it's a good time to buy.
Everything else is pure speculation... But then again so is the fact that it's a good time to buy. It's a better time to buy than it was last week, that's certain.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Fine, your post is all well and good if the people who lost their money were only day traders and MSFT shareholders but this unfortunately is not the case. The biggest losers in the stock market have been Linux pure plays. I know this because I have virtual portfolios and track the shares of Corel, VA linux, Red Hat and Caldera several times a day. It is clear from reading their charts that Linux companies have been dropping like rocks since mid-January while the entire Tech industry has been soaring up until the beginning of this month.
Several of these companies sent out the letter to several hackers who borrowed money or said they did here and here. Now how does it feel laughing in the face of poor students and hackers because they decided to invest in Linux based companies (which you obviously didn't because you'd be b*tching if you had shares in a company that was trading lower than it's IPO value like Andover and VA Linux instead of saying crap about doing research). I personally believe that gloating over the misfortune of others is evil especially since it affects us all. Firstly this will probably result in more mergers and aquisitions thereby consolidating power in fewer companies, also the fact that $2 trillion dollars was lost last week in the market correction thereby erasing the last year's $1.7 trillion gain in household income from stocks is not something to gloat over.
The fact that the post I am responding to has been moderated to a 5 makes me wonder about the character of the typical slashdot reader(i.e. moderator).
Let's face it, Anonymous Cowards have only proved how innessential they are over the last week. Every post gets at least thirty "ESR isn't rich anymore," and "Use VA stock to wipe your ass" posts. All these posts are saying how Linux is going down, blah blah blah.
:))
So let's look at other markets besides Linux.
Intel, January 3, it was $87, now it's $110.50. Intel is struggling. They can't get their stock very high. They might as well be out of business.
AMD, January 3 it was $31, now it's $66. That's more than double. You had better using Athlons, K6s. Anyone who doesn't is diluting themselves. (Ok, so that remark is true.
UPS, January 3, $67+, now it's $55. Federal Express, $42.93+ to $37.25. Shipping packages is obviously a dead market. Anyone who is still shipping packages is a dolt.
Eastman Kodak, January 3, $64.56+, now $61.50. Taking pictures is mildly waning. Take them if you want, but I'm using my eyes still.
It's all pointless. Things go down, they go up (the side which none of the trolls mention). If you are investing for the short term (four months), you are much more likely to get hurt. If you go for the long run (invested the day after the '87 hiccup), you're still way ahead of the game. Personally, I'll blame Clinton for all of this. If the marvelous economy is his doing, so is this downfall of our entire economy (for the weekend at least).
Anyway, time to bump the threshold up to 1 or 2. That takes care of the idiots. There really are fewer and fewer relevant posts in the 0 or -1 arena.
and closed on friday at 24 - well below it's IPO price.
Huh? IIRC IPO price was 14, and there was a split after that, so it should get below 7 to be below IPO price.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If you didn't own any vapor stocks, then you'll come out unscathed from this nonsense. If your own stocks plunged in sympathy with the rest of the market, then take this opportunity to invest more (if they're truly good companies). Otherwise, you're just gratifying yourself at the expense of others who, while stupid, have committed no other evil (if stupidity can be said to be evil).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is not the end of the world, but it's the end of those "lose money on every sale and make it up on volume" Internet companies. As the Red Herring pointed out, there are around 200 Internet companies that have to outperform Microsoft to justify their stock values. No way could that happen.
As for LNUX, its decline is only vaguely related to the overall market. Look at the chart.. It's been in a screaming dive since the IPO, down over 90% now. Regardless of market conditions or VA Linux press releases, the dive remains steady. It's a very pretty chart. I pointed this out a month ago, when LNUX dropped through 100. Now it's at 29. Enough said.
I cut that quote out of the paper a while ago. I try to remember it whenever I think about jumping on the bandwagon and buying the latest tech stock. Gerstner's philosophy doesn't seem to have had any effect on IBM's stock, though--they've slid this week too.
Greg
most will be like me, because most of the process I do manually will be automated into sites like MySimon. Those will be the powerful brands. That's why I don't think the portals like Yahoo! are overvalued. Those are the valuable brands, not individual sellers, even big ones like amazon.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I think this is my second post in two years. Frankly, I think this site covers too many things that are absolutely not important (Remember the posts about someone running a computer outside of it's case?), then skimp on the actual important information (Such as what the impact of a 30% correction in tech stocks is to the great many tech workers who receive stock options in lieu of higher pay). I have absolutely no doubt that it's more important to many than beer cooled processors. I honestly feel that the impact of slashdot on the free software community is a bad one, as it promotes the same sort of vigilante style attacks that I remember back in my OS/2 days. I still read slashdot, however, it's strictly due to the number of people that are influenced by this site. I feel a need to know where a sizable portion of the free software community is obsessing over at any given time. I honestly think that the motto should be changed from "stuff that matters" to "stuff that matters to Cdr Taco and those who follow his lead".
Note further that Senor Taco didn't post a single one of those.
:P
How ironic
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
Agreed. Va Linux, Caldera, LinuxCare, LinuxOne, Red Hat ,etc. IPOs are considered Slashdot worthy (just do a search of the IPOs previously reported on /.). Not to mention ESR boasting about his newly found wealth. But the plunge of the same stocks are considered not Slashdot worthy? At the least, the fortunes of the free software contributors offered stock options in VA Linux and Red Hat would be of great interest.
I think we've a serious case of denial here. Maybe Taco thinks that as long as it isn't posted on Slashdot, it ain't true. Well, reality goes on.
====
Since wealth is a big deal in civilization, and since nerds become wealthy via their stock options that typically vest after an IPO, the precipitous drop in the NASDAQ -- the primary market for technology IPOs -- is "News for nerds -- stuff that matters" as the motto for Slashdot says.
Seastead this.
Sorry, but your opinion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Ultimately, we, the slashdot readers, have to be kept happy, otherwise we won't read the adverts that pay the money that the stockholders expect to get in return for withholding their consumption of the capital they loaned to Mr. Taco.
:)
So yeah, it's still Mr. Taco's sandbox, and if he wants to succeed, he has to keep having interesting opinions.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Many people own stocks indirectly through their retirement funds. They are "ordinary people" who do not choose which stocks to buy, but they will feel the hit.
If firms lose money, even money that only exists "on paper" (horrible phrase), they lose investment potential and may lay off workers, etc. Big events percolate down.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Here are a few thigns it's good to remember.
.com companeis will DIE, as they will be unable to properly raise capital due to extrememly low stock valuations. This is GOOD. People must start viewing companies in a proper light, valuating them properly.... yes, a good idea for a .com startup is worth something, but how much? Why is an 'e-mall' that some guy created suddenly worth 50 million dollars? Where are the profits?
1) The reason redhat, va, and others lost so much value is because, according to the way stocks are traditionally valued, they were absolutely NOT worth the incredible amounts of money people were paying for them.
2) Also realize that, just because va goes from 300 to 30, this does not mean that VA is going 'broke' or is somehow 'losing money'. It simply means that the world sees it as not as valuable.
3) JDS Uniphase (everyone's heard of it, right?) at it's peak, had a market cap that was worth more than the market caps of Ford & GM combined. Does this seem realistic? Ford & GM employ many many thousands of people, and compbined, turn over a BILLION DOLLARS A MONTH in sales. JDS, though they have profits, good technology, and are certainly a good company, are nowhere near this size, so why were they worth more? Ford & GM going broke would change the entire economy of the country. So many people would be out of work. JDS going out of business would be a small, localized burp.
3) As for people losing money.. well.. I lost some money too... but one must realize, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Many have said for quite a while that lots of tech stocks were severely overvalued.. everyone had fair warning.
4) People who invested in strong companies will find that their companies will continue to grow, and continue to grow.. (JDS will grow. Cisco will grow. IBM will grow. Hell..even MSFT will grow, even with the trial and all).
5) Many of the worthless b2b and
6) Invest long, invest smart, don't daytrade. Actually read all about the companies you are investing in. Find out how much stock is out there, who holds it, who's running the company, what experience they have doing so.
7) Cash is king baby!
I wouldn't say it's like 1929 yet. The information age is still making a measurable impact on productivity, commerce, and efficiency. I would say it's more like the panic of 1857, where people didn't understand what the industrial revolution was all about and invested in all sorts of strange factories with strange busisness models that could not hold up profit. No doubt, there alot of dot.com companies out there who have unfloatable busisness models today that are going to be under the heat with the threat of higher interest rates and inflation.
It might not be all that bad. Temporary cycles are good, mild inflation keeps people from hoarding money, and mild recessions discourage excessive debt. Of course I've never trusted central federal authorities like the fed to make free market decisions, but this fed-reserve is seasoned with the fear of inflation and the fear of depressions, so I think they'll do OK - at least to the extent of preventing major disasters. So much ability to screw up in one centralized place is sort of scary though, and foolish monitary policy IMHO.
Had I got "The Letter" I'd have sold at the end of the first day and made a tidy little sum. I never expected them to go above $50 and I thought they'd drop again from there. Well they went considerably above $50 but they're about where I expected them to be now.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
FWIW, I think Rob should just grit his teeth and accept that for the sake of balance and journalistic integrity there are some stories that need to be reported even if they aren't intrinsically interesting.
Specifically, if he is going to allow stories about how XYZ Corp's IPO went through the roof then he should report it when the same stock falls through the floor. Surely this is self-evident?
We are mostly tech workers here, and a sudden withdrawal of finance from the industry is bound to affect us eventually in some way. Most of us aren't motivated to go and read the dry pronouncements of the Wall Street Journal. In fact there must be more than a few of us who don't get to hear about it if it doesn't get reported on Slashdot! So if we don't get to read about it here, then where?
Come on Rob, it seems like you're not facing up to your responsibilities. You're a media mogul now and the public is depending on you for the full story.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The justice department has set off a panic. I mean, Sun stock collapses the same day they announce increased earnings?
My theory: investors are willing to gamble on the unpredictability of tech companies, because these average out to be good gambles. But the unpredicatability of tech companies, and the unpredicatabiltiy of the justice department is too much, because all high tech companies are in violation of dozens of anti-trust laws.
Giving away software for free to gain market share? Preditory pricing. Only licensing your patents to people who don't directly compete against you? Sounds very monopolistic. Making proprietary modifications to standards to make sure that people using your products can't switch? ditto.
While all the CEOs are testifying before congress that Microsoft is the only one doing this sort of stuff, the market knows better. No one wants to invest in a regulated industry. Anything you do that makes a lot of money will bring a plague of justice department lawyers trying to prove you're a monopoly. Every time your competitors get mad, they'll complain to the government. Are we supposed to believe that government bureaucrats understand the dynamics of a market that companies can't even predict more than 6 months down the line?
On the bright side, maybe when the economy collapses, and we go back to high inflation, high unemployment, no stock options, and a higher budget deficit, they'll remember what caused it, and the politicians will finally notice that regulation does more harm than good.
--Kevin
If we are going to do this, I'd suggest discrete guidelines. Though I often quibble with the categories in the
Here are a few guidelines off the top of my head
1) If the Slashdot readership might have some unique insight of viewpoint.
In my fields of expertise (like medicine), I often seen discussions of limited values (or potentially harmful) in various Internet fora. I also see some sites where the discussion is far from what I may have learned in medical school, but which are of some significant value nonetheless (e.g. patient support groups, which may massacre the science or circulate dubious treatments are nonetheless often invaluable resources to many patients)
On the other hand, I think most slashdotters have little to add to the subject of a market-wide drop (except for anecdotes and insights into *their* companies, and I see very little of that) It would be difficult for our readers to be unaware of the market decline, and those ho care will go where the level of coverage/discussion is probably higher.
C'mon, we're geeks. We're not tied helplessly to some AOL (or i-Open) keyboard hotbutton. we have choices.
2) If a topic bears directly on a subject that has been of great interest to the Slashdot readership in the past
Privacy, Crypto, closed source fubars (even if they are merely listed under "It's funny, laugh"), cool gadgets, and many other topics fall into this category. If you didn't like most of them, tou wouldn't spend much time at
On the other hand, I wonder a little about people who post at length about a topic being "off-topic" If I'm not interested in an article, I may glance at the source material site, but I won't enter into the discussion. Then again, I believe that the guy who walks up to a conversation at a party, just to say it's boring is himself a boor (and bore). I'd rather find an interesting conversation or leave the party.
3) if Slashdot decides editorially to bring a subject to the attention of the readers
This isn't abuse or conspiracy. It's the function of an editor. Yes,
However, it is true that there can be abuses, but most of the genuine abuses under this type of system involve *misrepresentation*, not just the choice of topic. Why? Because
4) if an item in a core topic is noteworthy and/or interesting
Not everything that fits into one of
The editor's choices are what made
5) I sure hope you all are a lot more polite when one of your friends raises an item s/he finds interesting, but you don't
__________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Ok, first, none of the stories you listed were posted by CmdrTaco. Second, as he said in his intro to the article, he "only brings up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in, not when the story is "The Market."
This does not mean that the stock market is never mentioned. It means that Slashdot is a niche news site and mainstream news is covered only when it relates directly to Slashdot's niche, ie. News for Nerds.
B
Slashdot targets "News for nerds" and other "Stuff that matters." Unfortunately, as in cases like this, we get a bit of a conflict when the story poster doesn't see the relevance.
Rather than harrrasing Mr. Malda, why don't you move to a site that has story moderation so you can see if the general populace wants to read and discuss such a story? Kuro5hin.org is the place. It's oriented towards technology and culture -- not just news about nerdy things or things that matter. We've even had stock stories before.
I agree with Mr. Malda that this story doesn't really fit with Slashdot, it could fit on other sites. So why not use them?
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Here's an excerpt from an email conversation between Rob and I which took place in April of 1999. It echoes the same sort of sentiments that this (today's) post does. He isn't kidding.
( Me: )
> (or yours) for granted. We were just looking for a creative way to drum up a
> little support, and have some fun in the process.
> poll turned out to be one of the most popular user polls we've ever had.
( Rob: )
*laugh*. No problems. I just get annoyed occasionally. You should see the
submissions box. Not posting a story usually == Conspiracy on my part
according to some people. Its annoying
And here's an excerpt out of a different email, two weeks later in early May of '99..
( Me: )
> Yeah, sometimes. The fun isn`t so much in painting the stuff, as it is in
> actually delivering it, and seeing people use and enjoy it. Much of it is
> just plain hard work..Prop for E alone took me well over a month to
> produce. Making it was an ordeal--but delivering it, and seeing people's
> chins drop was a joy.
( Rob: )
*laugh*
Its a little different for me. So much of my feedback is typically
negative that I just ignore most of it. I do what I like- I always
have, but that 'jaw dropping' doesn't work to well here-- I've posted
3500+ stories, and 3400 were fine, but once a week I post one that
someone disagrees with and WHAM
Maybe that gives you a little window on what it might be like to be on Rob's side of the table. The rest of you can give the guy a fucking break and sit on your hands if you have nothing better to do than bitch. If you think about the combined effect of thousands of people whining a similar whine, you wouldn't want to be on the recieving end either. If you appreciate Slashdot, great, show your appreciation by not adding to the noise. Consider using your brain and doing something useful with it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
Actually Gates has only about 10% of the MSFT stock according to microsoft's 10Q so its share price wouldn't drop that much. However in the current climate it would proabably plummet since investors would think that MSFT was in trouble and would then dump it
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
---
We're confusing 2 things here: brand of the product and brand of WHO you buy it from. I don't think the latter will be that important in the 'net space and is being tremendously overvalued.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Well... do you know why my GPLed code still has the same value it had back when linux/gpl/opensource was IPO heaven? I'll tell you why- because I'm perhaps a bit strange and that concept, that the stuff I _shared_ had a speculative value, never even 'computed' for me. It's a big nil pointer for me, because to me the value of the stuff I share _is_ that sharing, is the RELATIONSHIPS I create by doing so. _that_ is where the value is and that is where Linux started and why it will always have a core value that can't be swept away...
I've built a recording studio (obHype: mp3.com/ChrisJ) and several times now, I've offered to help out CmdrTaco and the whole Geeks In Space crowd, which would be fun and not too hard for me to do. And you know, from the viewpoint of a linux-stock millionare, I can see how the help of some dude in Vermont building equipment with a soldering iron and wirestrippers might seem nice but pointless- more fun to buy your own! Bigger mixers, more tracks, etc etc etc since money flows like water!
Well- he ain't a linux stock millionare anymore. I'm not sure how many of the Slashdot people's plans are still feasible- but _I'm_ still there, offering to help. What I offered never had anything to do with money and demands nothing from Taco and company but sharing- let me help out, let's play, let's see what we can do.
Look around- there are a _lot_ of Linux things that are utterly unaffected by the crash. People trying to 'rub it in' about the obliteration of those wild valuations? It's like they're speaking a different language- and they always were. ESR may be shocked or hurt by all this, because it hits him where he lives- he always bought heavily into wanting Linux legitimised by business and valuation. Some of us always resisted this pressure to redefine the value in money and profit terms. Now maybe it'll be easier to make the point that Linux is not a phenomenon based on money.
*g* anybody considered the idea that if there _is_ another Great Depression and everybody's reduced to living off pentium IIs and such ( ;) ), they won't be able to afford The Microsoft Tax, and will _have_ to turn to Linux and proliferate it, not because it is a lottery ticket to wealth, but because it is free?
Many IPO's return to the price they start out at aaafter taking off for a few months.
RHAT will very likely find a bottom in the mid to low 20's. It will also probably grow slowly back to the highs it saw in the next 18 months or so.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Linux stocks have been dropping all year, even when NASDAQ was going up. Since April 3, when all the tech stocks started getting hammered, Linux stocks in particular have been tremendous losers. Some numbers, in increasing order of losses:
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
4/15/00 2:57 AM Rommel Ooooh, the stock market makes me wish I had nippels the size of toledo so I could rent them out to survive the coming great depression!
Lemur *points out you have created a terribly confunsed fox with that statement*
Rommel it's badnasty
Lemur rEAL BAD? HOW COME i HAVEN'T EVEN HEARD ABOUT IT? (oops, caps lock) I watch the news every day.
Rommel they're trying to downplay the hell out of it, but the dow was down 744 points on friday, it creeped back up to 612 down, but that's still down
Lemur What does it mean?
Rommel it means the investors are running scared, the stock market was melting like a candle in a quasar
Lemur *a clueless face greets you...
Rommel http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/2000 0414/aonline210441_000.htm
Lemur That looks not-fun to read..
Rommel well that's what it's all about. if you want to know, go there. someone has censored the press of the rest of the country
Rommel the worst stock market drop EVER and no news about it in america? that's bullshit, I watched the mother f'er happen
Lemur Stock fox?
Rommel tell everyone you know, biggest market drop ever and they're trying to sweep it under the rug
Rommel I woke up, I joined a couple channels on undernet, someone mentioned the stock market was disolving. I understand the stock market rather well, so that filled me with an odd mixture of glee and fear. I hit my favorite news sources and they're all pissing in their pants. then the market closed and all the news articles were quietly swept under the rug. that's bullshit
Lemur Who/what does it effect?
Rommel everybody, the last time the stock market crashed was 1920. ever heard of a little thing called the great depression?
Lemur yeah but I don't know what that means... The stock market went down and suddenly everyone is poor... There was no money to back up the numbers... Where does it go?
Rommel it never existed to begin with, that's the secret. the idea of the stock market is that I have some money, and I give it to you in the form of stock, but everyone looks at me as if I still have it. you go spend it and give me some of what you make off of it, and whoever you give it to gives it away again as stock, but everyone looks at him as if he still had it. it just goes around and around until someone figures it out and wants their money back
Lemur When someone ends up with stock they can't use?
Lemur use/sell
Rommel yeah. the only reason people SHOULD by stock is that you get back a pretty good return on what you give out, based on what the company you gave it to is earning. but if the company suddenly doesn't make money anymore nobody wants it's stock and they all want their money back. the company won't give it, they spent it all, and nobody will buy it from them because it's worthless. so they just flushed their money down the toilet
Rommel they they think, "oh shit, maybe I should get rid of the rest of this stock before the same thing happens." something is only valuable if more people want it than has it, if nobody wants it it isn't worth anything, and the only reason managers and CEOs bust their asses for the company is that they have lots of stock and they want to keep it valuable. if they're stock isn't worth shit anymore they tend to shoot themselves and then all us workers don't have jobs anymore
Rommel the dow and nasdaq were pushed up by people saying 'hey! these dot.com stocks may make me a good return someday! I want to buy them NOW so I can make a lot of money later. these companies are never going to make money, and when the stock holders figure that out they find out all the money they spent would have been better utilized to kindle a fire to keep them warm when the next depression hits because of the morons and their dot.com stocks
Lemur oh..
Rommel see why I'm nervous yet?
Lemur yeah
Rommel AND NOT ONLY THAT, but everybody and their sister has been working for years and years to put money into a 401k plan, which is a way to put your money into the stock market. if the market crashes it's just bilked most of america out of their retirement plans. and people won't be happy with that
Lemur yikes
Rommel idiots, all of them. I have no money put into a 401k, because I would rather have that money now than watch it disolve later. like any jar, it only gets fuller as long as people put more into it than they take out. if everyone puts it in at once it looks like it's filling really fast, so people put more in. when people get old and start to take it back out, it turns into the social security system that there won't be a dime left in when I get old
Rommel the difference is that this time instead of a government program run bankrupt it will be the stock market, which is tied to our frigging jobs. IDIOTS. I want to move to the asteroid belt
Rommel the reason you don't hear about this is that nobody wants to hear it. it's making money right now, so screw the future. the ones putting it up will be living in barbados off the cash they milked off the market by the time push comes to shove
bend like the reed
3 years ago I read more Slashdot. Today I read more Wired and EE Times. Ever since Columbine, Slashdot comments have consisted of mainly high school students ranting about how life sucks. The shift toward politics and cryptography is so boring it might just be the reason everyone would rather talk about Natalie Portman at senior prom than what new crypto export regulation came out yesterday. Even CNN doesn't focus as much on politics as Slashdot does because it's too boring.
I don't presume to speak for the Slashdot community, but I've always found that the reason that slashdot is so useful to me is that it has stories which, while I could find them somewhere else, I would have to wade through a massive amount of noise, just to get to the "News for Me. Stuff that matters." Now I don't have any problem with a story about how the market has crashed, but you'd have to have been living in a cave not to already have heard this, and in this sense, it is not particularly valuable to me.
Several months ago, in the course of my work, Jack Simth of ABC news was filming a segment for ABC Nightly News. During the course of the shoot, they informed us that there was some breaking hot story at HP. When he told me what it was about, I told him that I had read about it on Slashdot almost a week before. This is the real value of Slashdot to me. I hate to say it Cmdr. Taco, but on the story about the stock market slideing, you got scooped.
Please don't take this a criticism, I think slashdot is one of the greatest sites on the net. And for those who think it has been slipping lately, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds:
If you think you can do it better, by all means do it.
Easy. Whenever a user submits a story, a forum is made available for it via their user page regardless of whether or not it gets posted to the front page. Or perhaps every story submission goes in at 0 and the trained mammals prod the good stories to +1 or +2. Then users can decide which level of stories, or which member's submissions they want to see and no one can say they're being censored.
It isn't Linux companies; it is companies that were hugely over-valued at their IPO. The latest Wall Street insanity is Linux. Before that, it was portals. Before that, it was Internet commerce companies. Before that, it was general Internet companies. This isn't so much a reflection of Linux companies as it is a reflection of Wall Street's rather short attention span.
As an example: In the past year, Yahoo!, everyone's favorite Internet company, and one of the few Wall Street darlings to make a profit, as fallen 78 percent. Far more then any Linux company you mention. Yet I don't think Yahoo is going anywhere.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Huh? Let's pretend for the moment that many people who write free software do it because it's fun. Now, why would those people suddenly lose interest in something they think is fun just because economic times are hard? I suppose you could argue that they'd have to work twice as hard to support families or some such thing, but I'd be surprised if that caused them to ditch something that gave them joy and the respect and recognition of their peers. It has only been very recently that free software developers had even the tiniest chance of becoming truly rich.
Or think about art. Art and artists might seem to flourish more when times are good and people spend money on art. But I don't think that means that the art world goes away when times are bad (sometimes the opposite).
Babar
Normally I agree with most of Robs comments, but our opinions diverge here. I think our "Illustrious Leader" [ :-)] is being a little inconsistent here - he's happily put stories on about IPOs, stock offerings, the effects of suddenly finding oneself wealthy after IPOs, company takeover news etc....
The fact is that some stock market news is applicable to Slashdot readers and therefore should be reported. Obviously I don't think every last detail should be reported, just as I don't think that minor releases on the development branch of the linux kernel should be reported. But a hefty crash on NASDAQ, which is the home of a number of major technology stocks is most definitely of interest to some or all Slashdot readers. Stock market levels can have major effects on the employment status of us nerds and a high stock market is a Good Thing (TM) as it means people are investing in technology companies, providing employment, which pays our salaries.
Maybe Rob should add a separate topic section for financial news and have an option to put a NASDAQ ticker on our customised Slashdot page!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Yes, I am a professor of economics as well as a lawyer. But if you manage :)
:)
to construe this as legal advice, you probably need a shrink
>Of course I've never trusted central
>federal authorities like the fed to make free market decisions, but
>this fed-reserve is seasoned with the fear of inflation and the fear
>of depressions, so I think they'll do OK - at least to the extent of
>preventing major disasters.
Yes and no. Today the monetarists are pretty much in control of our
monetary policy. To put their views in a nutshell,
1) the government can't achieve anything by mucking around with monetary
policy, as people react to the policy and it is countered.
2) the government *can* screw up the economy with monetary policy--among
other things, it can make fluctuations more violent.
3) inflation is bad
4) deflation is worse
These lead to
5) any activist policy (an attempt to fix or better the economy) will
be defeated by choices of agents in the economyk
Therefore,
6) Have a well-known rule of monetary behavior.
Noting that
7) a growing economy with steady price levels needs more money to
handle the additional transactions,
we get the basic monetarist rule:
8) Have the money supply grow at a fixed, well known rate.
9) The rate which avoids inflation and deflation is the average rate
of growth of the economy.
They accept then that
10) You'll be high some years, and low others. But you get less fluctation
and smaller shocks than any other policy.
There are variations, and disputes as to what the actual rate in 9) is, and
whether or not it is changing. But this is will put you in the right
range for most modern monetarists.
These guys *expected* the 82 recession. However, since
11) if inflation is expected, the expected level is the *starting* point
the only way to get rid of existing inflation and establish the rules of 8 and
9 is to accept the recession to establish the credibility of these rules. It's
not that they wanted the recession, but believed that the longer it was
postponed, the worse it would be (look at countrys that actually got
hyperinflation).
While there's a couple of topics where monetarism has failed, most of its
predictions came true--notably, Milton Friedman was considered a crank
when he predicted the stagflation of the 70's--and then it happened.
We have essentially had an ongoing expansion for over 15 years. Yes,
there was a minor recession late in the Bush administration, which
barely met the definition. Overall, though, it's really the same
expansion, and *neither* party is going to muck with it. They'll try
to pressure Greenspan for short term gains, but both parties will keep
with him as long as he's willing, and he'll be replaced with someone
similar.
Hmm, I should clip those 11 points for next year's Money & Banking
class.
To summarize the monetarist summary: You can't make it any better,
so just avoid mucking it up.
hawk, as an economist today. Hmm, so should I sign it dr hawk?
and here you're showing exactly why so many people lost money in this correction in the tech sector. NO, you are not evaluating what the company will be worth next year, you are giving the value of the company today. People started giving tech stocks huge valuations in price because they thought they saw these companies making huge amounts of money soon, just not now. Most other companies are evaluated on what they're doing right now, what their debt is, what their gains or losses are and will be, etc. Part-ownership in an ongoing loss? Just because a company offers stock does not mean that they're losing money. A profitable company with no debt can offer stock as simply a way of converting a share of their company into capital that they can use for their own purposes. The market valuation of that %% ownership determines how much their company is worth. The prediction you are talking about is what the analysts THINK they company will do in the coming quarter, but as we all know, there aren't always correct, and actual earnings are what really count, not predictions.