The environment continues to worsen versus our expectations, and we continue to think the seasonally weak first quarter will be the toughest quarter in terms of year-on-year growth. |
The environment continues to worsen versus our expectations, and we continue to think the seasonally weak first quarter will be the toughest quarter in terms of year-over-year growth. We also continue to expect the market to strengthen in the second half of the year, when the impact of the dot.com bubble has worked its way out of the system. |
The good B2B stocks are dizzyingly expensive, but we would rather pay up for them than look for cheap stocks of poorer companies. |
The majority of AOL's profits are derived from its pure advertising and commerce revenue, so strong sequential growth in this line is critical to the long-term growth story. |
The majority of today's pure-play Internet companies will never make money and will not exist in three-to-five years. There will be a lot of consolidation and a lot of failure, and ultimately valuations will fall more in line with historical norms. |
The online advertising market appears to be stabilizing, but we believe it will continue to remain challenging for the foreseeable future. |
The sentiment surrounding the leading companies in the consumer Internet sector appears to be improving as we approach the seasonally strong fall and winter period. We continue to believe that some of the leading consumer advertising and e-commerce stocks -- America Online, Yahoo, and Amazon.com -- will benefit from this. |
The timing of this reset relative to the current stock prices is, again, not a prediction of future weakness. In fact we believe that many of the stronger stocks may be near seasonal bottoms. |
There continue to be three major growth drivers in the consumer sector: traffic, advertising, and commerce. Traffic growth in the U.S. continues to slow, as more than 50 percent of the total market is already online. More importantly, we estimate that more than 80 percent of disposable income is already online. |
Thus, we regard the ruling as an incremental positive for the stock. |
We also believe such controversy, if any, would come at a poor time for Microsoft, given that the company is awaiting the Appeals Court ruling on the existing antitrust trial. As a result, we believe it is possible that this could put a damper on the positive sentiment surrounding the stock. |
We also believe that some analysts are projecting that the company will miss the low end of the guidance range in Q3 and withdraw its goal of operating profitability in Q4. As a result, if the company hits the mid-point of the guidance range and reaffirms Q4 operating profitability, we would expect the stock to go up. |
We also continue to believe that the market is transitioning into a more mature phase of growth ... [this] will cause a shakeout and consolidation. As this consolidation continues, we believe the Internet spoils will increasingly go to the few, not the many. |
We are simply exhausted by the endless postponement of financial gratification - and we think other investors are, too. |
We believe AOL and Time Warner are in the final stages of gaining approval from U.S. and Europe regulatory commissions. We do expect any concessions that would materially impact future performance. |