Good overview on the DD. I never did pull the trigger on QUOT and decided to wait for the third quarter numbers. I was very disappointed to see the sequential decline in the third quarter revenues and even more disappointed to see that the revenue levels appear to be very closely tied to marketing expenditures. No clear path to profitability.
On the plus side, management is very experienced and they do have Intuit as a shareholder.
Friday's implosion was interesting. Possible explanation:
quicken.com
Quotesmith Tanks As Big Sellers Dumps Shares
Friday, October 27, 2000 04:09 PM
By Erik Ahlberg
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
CHICAGO (Dow Jones)--Shares of Quotesmith.com Inc. (QUOT, news, msgs) dropped as much as
60% Friday as a small number of sellers dumped huge blocks.
Several sources speculated that the shares came primarily from one mutual fund firm trying to
establish a tax loss before the end of the fiscal year.
Shares recently traded at $0.875, off $0.50, or 36.4%, on volume of 1.3 million shares. The stock's
daily average volume is just more than 52,000 shares.
Quotesmith Chief Financial Officer David Vickers said the company's overall health and strategy remain
unchanged. The company reported a third-quarter loss of $3.5 million, or 18 cents a share. The results
beat Wall Street expectations of a loss of 27 cents a share.
Vickers said Quotesmith was curbing its advertising spending slightly in the fourth quarter to help with
the launch of more insurance products.
Analyst Per Ostlund of John G. Kinnard & Co. Inc. in Minneapolis said the company's current cash
holdings equal roughly $1.65 a share. While the company is going through its cash in order to grow the
business, Ostlund said the huge stock sales Friday were "kind of a bizarre deal."
Quotesmith, of Darien, Ill., is an Internet insurance company.
-By Erik Ahlberg, Dow Jones Newswires; 312-750-4141 |
