Ron Hill Time Quotations

The markets continue to mark time. Every day we get worries about inflationary pressures and interest rate pressures. Stocks have a hard time rising, but the reasons to rise are still coming through with strong earnings gains.

Gene 'Mr. America' Stanlee was one of my favorites as a younger boy. I think he was one of the best 'showmen' in the business, but I never would bet on him in a 'shoot' even if it was against my Aunt Tillie after we dug her up from the grave. I saw him in a match with Guy LaRose when Guy had to put him over two straight. That was when LaRose was leaving Paul Bowser's office and heading for Chicago where he became 'Hans Schmidt.' Guy didn't like it one but, but did his job. Gene was extremely hot at that time and was selling out wherever he went.

That's another thing that helps these companies do well in this time period,

They're on the right track for subscriber growth, ... But more importantly, they're starting to focus now on getting more money out of each subscriber. So one of the tricky things will be to get people to stop focusing purely on subscriber growth and start thinking more about revenue per subscriber. They've got their own sort of gathering area for shopping for e-commerce, for Christmas time. Remember e-commerce season starts now with back-to-school and peaks with Christmas. This is going to be a time of a lot of excitement in the Internet space and we think AOL is well positioned to take advantage of that.

This is a time when you really start to favor industrial conglomerates overall, so if news would turn on GE and Tyco International, that could even be interesting because they're all out there in the same group. But right now 3M actually has the best fundamentals and so that's why we highlight that one,