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Herb Greenberg
Talk time... another way of introducing another edition of... the Hotline. Up first: International Speedway (ISCA Quote). Heard back from the company yesterday. Spokesman says there simply is no conflict of interest between the company and Nascar. "They're run as separate organizations," he says. He's referring to concerns, raised here, that the France family, which controls both, is favoring itself when it hands out new Winston Cup races. "The family uses outside firms to make sure they're doing everything that they legally need to do to make sure the two companies are kept separate and that there's no conflict of interest," the spokesman says. But what about the fact that the two companies share the same offices, the same lawyers and even the same receptionist? "We may have the same address but I don't know anything about their financials," the spokesman says... Not that I ever thought the spokesman did, but hey, we're jus' tryin' ta be fair.
Attention Staples (SPLS Quote) shoppers: Went shopping over the weekend for office supplies online at Office Depot (ODP Quote). Do this once or twice a year so we have extra printer cartridges, copier toner and copy paper in the house. (Always seems the cartridges run dry on a Sunday night when some school project is due!) And they deliver the next day for free if you order more than $50. Such a deal! Should be a snap, right? Wrong. Took at least 40 minutes. The site was up. The site was down. And the site was clumsy. Clumsier than I remember. Not easy to navigate; needs some serious upgrading. But such is life. The real problem was that Office Depot was out of stock on a few items. So, since it was just a click away, I went over to Staples.com, which had the items in stock. However, and this is why I'm writing this, Staples' prices were higher by as much as $5 on each item. Don't these guys realize that on the Internet it's easy to do comparison shopping? And Staples wonders why its online losses have been much higher than expected?! Best of the worst: The other day MicroStrategy (MSTR Quote) announced it was issuing convertible preferred stock (the kind you generally only do when you can't get cash on other terms) in a structure similar to a recent deal done by eToys (ETYS Quote) ... with some of the same investors! However, according to Eric Von der Porten, of Leeward Investments in California, who reads those documents as a hobby, "Microstrategy got much better terms, though, and that deal highlights just how terrible the eToys financing is. For example, the initial conversion price for Microstrategy is the average price over the next 17 days. And, the initial conversion price is set for one year. For eToys, on the other hand, the conversion price is the lowest closing bid price over any five-day period. That's a big difference in both the likely outcome for the company and the likely impact on the stock price."Please join me and Paul McEntire, president of the Bearguard Fund, as we show you why the shorts can help you save your shirt at the first RealMoney.com Investor's Conference. McEntire, a veteran short-seller, started Bearguard last year. It's the first short-only stock mutual fund. We'll both share our tips on how to spot trouble, followed by my questions to Paul and your questions to both of us. Surviving and profiting in treacherous markets June 28th, 2000, Marriott World Trade Center, New York City For information and registration, go to Real Money Conferences.
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