| David Mandl on Tue, 14 Dec 1999 18:16:58 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Re: TBTF: eToys pays in market cap for bullying etoy |
On the I'd-like-it-to-be-so front: I'd put the eToys drop in the same category as levitation of the Pentagon: Publicly, to support the cause, I'd swear I saw the building rise. Why not? The whole thing was about psyching people out anyway. But if "one of us" asked me in private, did I really, truly see the building levitate?, I'd let him in on the secret. So, publicly, I'd have no problem with press releases attributing the stock drop to the atack on eToy. Great idea. Freaking out/scaring the hell out of eToys is what this is all about, after all. But among friends, if someone were to ask me, honestly, I'd say: Not a snowball's chance in hell. The people who can make a stock like that drop that much (big NASDAQ market makers, big money managers, soulless day traders) care less than zero about a bunch of marginal weirdo net artists. There are infinitely bigger news stories about Issues People Care About at the moment--slave-labor factories in Asia, for example--and even those rarely cause the speculators in question to dump their stock. There's just no way. I'm not a defeatist, but it's important to keep the signifance of stories like the eToy attack *to the world at large* in perspective. Cheers, --D. On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Declan McCullagh wrote: > I'm hardly interested in the type of formal proof that would satisfy a > mathematician. But folks who follow the market would readily accept the > events I cited (analyst ratings, increased competition, slow growth) as > adequate explanations of the drop. > > You are backing a novel interpretation. For that you need a bit more proof > than an I'd-like-it-to-be-so hunch. Correlation does not equal casuation, > remember, and I'd say the etoys.com legal win probably boosted their stock > price instead. > > -Declan > > > At 15:59 12/12/1999 -0500, t byfield wrote: > >declan: > > > >there's no doubt that the events you cite affected etoys' stock > >price (that much seems clear); but the question remains whether > >they're *adequate* explanations of the drop. i don't think that > >has been proven, or even can be proven. > > <...> > > > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] > -- Dave Mandl [email protected] [email protected] http://www.wfmu.org/~davem # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]