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Red Herring ment: mefiez-vous des rhats!

Red Herring: Investor rage gets ugly

Voici le fond de l'histoire selon RH... Red Herring:

We get death threats at work from dissatisfied shareholders," says
Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT), whose stock plummeted
from a high of $143 in December 1999 to a low of $5 a year later,
erasing $23 billion worth of market capitalization. "People bought in
when the stock was hot and the movement was hot," Mr. Szulik groans,
"and now they're pissed."... 

People traded on whims, gut feelings, and often with no more knowledge
than a company's ticker symbol. So imagine the surprise of these
novices when the stock market -- which had done nothing but go up
since they signed on -- suddenly expected them to share the burden of
$4.7 trillion in losses.

http://www.redherring.com/index.asp?layout=story&doc_id=1270019527&channel=20000002

D'abord, mettons les choses au clair: les actions sont passées de
286.23$, le 9 décembre 1999 à environ 10$ aujourd'hui. Évidemment,
mathématiquement, ce que dit l'article, c'est du pareil au même. On
pourrait tout aussi bien dire que les actions sont passées de 1.43$ à
5¢, mais l'effet est loin d'être le même.

Et puis, si la cour leur donne raison, les investisseurs pourraient
effectivement avoir été floués:

n exchange for the excessive commissions, the complaint alleges, lead
underwriter The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and underwriters Credit
Suisse First Boston Corp. and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith,
Inc. allocated Red Hat shares to customers at the IPO price of $14 per
share. To receive the allocations (i.e., the ability to purchase
shares) at $14, the defendant underwriters' brokerage customers had to
agree to purchase additional shares in the aftermarket at
progressively higher prices. The requirement that customers make
additional purchases at progressively higher prices as the price of
Red Hat stock rocketed upward (a practice known on Wall Street as
``laddering'') was intended to (and did) drive Red Hat's share price
up to artificially high levels. This artificial price inflation, the
complaint alleges, enabled both the underwriters and their customers
to reap enormous profits by buying stock at the $14 IPO price and then
selling it later for a profit at inflated aftermarket prices, which
rose as high as $56.75 during its first day of trading. 

Rather than allowing their customers to keep their profits from the
IPO, the complaint alleges, the defendant underwriters required their
customers to ``kick back'' some of their profits in the form of secret
commissions. These secret commission payments were sometimes
calculated after the fact based on how much profit each investor had
made from his or her IPO stock allocation. 

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010329/2557.html

Note: Des  poursuites pour des motifs similaires ont été entreprises
par deux autres bureaux d'avocats.

Bien que le montant des pertes pour les investisseurs de Microsoft
soit beaucoup plus important, il n efaut pas oublier que 28$ investis
dans RHAT à son apogée ne valent plus qu'un (1) dollar alors que 10$
investis dans MSFT à son apogée valent toujours 6$.

Quant aux bénéfices depuis les débuts des deux compagnies, les courbes
suivantes parlent d'elles-mêmes:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MSFT&d=c&t=my&l=on&z=b&q=l  (MSFT Chart
from beginning)

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHAT&d=c&t=2y&l=on&z=b&q=l   (RHAT Chart
from beginning)

En d'autres mots, en affaires, ne jamais se fier aux rhats! La licence
GPL n'a pas été conçue pour permettre à des compagnies de survivre,
encore moins de s'introduire en Bourse.

GP
--
La Masse Critique
Rencontrez Néfertiti, Einstein, Tocqueville, etc.

Le sionisme est aujourd'hui aux juifs ce que le nazisme était aux Allemands chrétiens.
http://pages.infinit.net/mcrit/sionisme.html