Steve Harmon

As 1998 nears to an end, this nascent Internet industry has the dubious distinction of being both young and old at the same time. Young vs. the plethora of industries out there that count years in solar time but old in the rapid evolution within the industry of the companies and players at play where […]

First reader up writes: “Steve: How about phantom Internet stocks? Barron’s thought Fed Express could be a winner from all this e-commerce. What about companies that make e-commerce software? Like Open Market or Broadvision. Didn’t Intel just buy a privately held company that makes e-commerce software iCat. What’s the future for these company types?” Reply: […]

Don’t tell the bearded ladies investment club but while the Dow, NASDAQ, S&P and other indices may find 5% gains in a week if they’re lucky, Internet.com’s IPODEX ran up 11% blended results the past week with the leading riser Exodus (NASDAQ:EXDS) up 41%. All but five of the 17 stocks in this basket ended […]

On a value per user basis this week’s WEBDEX shows Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) trading at a 4x premium to the average user value for the top 10 Web sites. Kind of puts things in context when you consider that even with a 27% rise since December 2, Infoseek’s user base trades at 16% of Yahoo, and […]

The oft-repeated axiom that size matters must be recast as security matters, and it’s about time. All year long we’ve said security could find legs and until recently all it had was weak knees. Since December 1, however, our breakout of ISDEX by sector shows that security led the way, up 16.3% while ISDEX overall […]

Don’t blink but the ever-evolving and constantly content driven financial news site CBS MarketWatch.com filed to go public at what our analysis shows could be 18x annualized quarterly sales or an estimated 10x 1999 sales. The San Francisco-based outfit employs 40 journalists to varying degrees (fulltime to freelance) to produce daily stock market news and […]

First reader up send us this from Paris, France: “Do you think that community based sites such as iVillage will go public soon? Do you think these stock are a big investment opportunity?” Reply: iVillage touts itself as the women’s network and claims 73 million monthly page views. The company recently closed $32.5 million in […]

  04-Dec-98 point change % change ISDEX 216.31 2.95 1.38% NASDAQ 2,003.16 48.83 2.50% DJIA 9,016.14 136.46 1.54% uBid (NASDAQ:UBID), a Web auction service, jumps 220% from its $15 IPO price, closing at $48 per share. UBID climbed as high as $60.25 per share on its 1.58 million offer through Merrill Lynch, UBID opens at […]

Like Scrooge, Internet stocks have been on a wild ride from the ghost of Christmas past, present and future. This holiday season Wall Street shopped early (November) for e-tail stocks and now has turned its fickle attention to Internet IPOs. The past three Internet stock offers from very different companies have done well in the […]

This week’s big cable industry convention in Anaheim is all abuzz about cable Internet. Oddly, wired warrior John Malone is not making any predictions this year. Ever since cable titan Malone’s infamous 500-channel universe sermon on the mount in 1994 the cable industry, captains of American business, half of Hollywood and all of Gollywood (futurists) […]

Commerce software maker Open Market (NASDAQ:OMKT), long ignored as investors snapped up shares of more well-known e-tailers, finally got its due as OMKT soared 130% to $15.6875 per share since November 24. Behind the sleigh ride was Open Market’s debut November 30 of its ‘eChristmas program’ which lets small businesses add payment, credit card approval […]

Before the $4.2 billion AOL-Netscape deal comes to pass, it’s important to learn from Mozilla’s history. Netscae’s biggest strategic error was to sell its real estate cheaply, charging the fledgling search engines and Web guides just $4 million to $5 million a year in 1996 and 1997 for placement on Netscape.com. The other faux paux […]