"Hello Buddycom.

Buddycom had written:

'If you can't trust Dr. CE Koop, you can't trust anybody. How do you make five grand from five hundred without options? You enter a limit order for KOOP somewhere around $1, say at 3/4 and wait till the judge throws out the eleven ridiculous/frivolous lawsuits. Or just enter sell limit at $5 after you get the shares.'

Tempting ;-)!

I don't gamble in the market or anywhere else, but I am curious enough about your statement, which I take as a serious tip, to ask two questions:

1) What are the law suits about?
2) How does one make a 10-fold return on the outcome of the possible or likely dismissal of the law suits?

Is everyone out there convinced of the good doctor's guilt, bidding down his stock in the interim?

Is a 'limit order' the key to major growth in value due to leverage and risk of some kind, which you have have not yet explained?

The recent story* doesn't say a word about the law suits but addresses Dr. Koop's projects on medical ethics via Internet. This sounds (at first guess) like measures taken to protect his Internet investments, which might be adversely affected by the law suits you mention, though (like you) I am inclined to trust the good doctor, mindful that one can fall into the pitfalls of the Internet without being on the far side of actionable deceit."

Hind sight is twenty twenty. We never use cliches.
We wrote a couple of blurbs about Dr Koop after the company went IPO. It's still there. We never altered it, until today. Looking back we know that there was no need to change it. We mentioned a ficticious concept called, Koop's Dictum, on the animals page in connection with Dr Paul Ehrlich. And we mentioned something about the raw deal that Mr Bush handed Dr C Everett Koop on the Finance page. We want to give an in-depth answer. But, since you aren't going to open your Schwab account soon, it'll all be academic anyway. No on second thought we are going to post this as the first installment of the ,

Just the facts. Visually. Then a little history. Then direct answers to the questions.

Type in KOOP in the Yahoo quote box, and hit return. You'll see a 3 month chart if you click on 3m. Then if you type an extra m in the location bar after the last "=" and of course hit return, you will get a chart with moving average lines. You see a flat orange line at about the $1 level. You see a green line sloping down from left to right. The lines don't intersect at any point. If you extrapolate out a bit, you can see that in the relatively near future the orange line will cross the green line. In the 1700's an old guy named Honma, the most famous of the early Japanese rice futures traders got everybody hep to the idea of using charts to look at trading activity. He coined a term for that point where the orange line crosses the green line. He called it the, "golden cross." Ostensibly, every Kabu Sensei in Japan knows about it. They also know about the other cross situation the, "dead cross." That's where the orange line is above the green line but, that's not the situation we have here, so I'm not going to open that can of worms.

The news.
You can get the play by play details from Yahoo! in chronological order. Go to the bottom of the page and click on all news or whatever the link actually is. Where to click is as important as what you use to click. We suspect you are using a mouse designed by an ergonomic moron because you want to get tunnel syndrome. Otherwise you'd be using a trackball or pressure pad. We had to quit using a mouse about ten years ago. Pressure tablets or trackballs, period. Only an idiot would use a computer without them. Oops, sorry, big fellah. Maybe we should reread, How to Make Enemies and Alienate People. You aren't still using a mouse are you? You can get one at any store that has computer stuff.

Let's try again.
The news hilights from day one and skeptical interpretation.
If you gamble with stocks and options you put on your skeptic's hat. Take off your idealist's hat and put it somewhere completely out of sight. Don't throw it away completely. And you don't want to forget where you put it. In the attic is fine. Out of sight, out of mind. In the markets, an ounce of skepticism is worth a pound of optimism.

Let's get serious, or skeptical. As you prefer. What is the bottom line? Could the bottom line be that the news on KOOP is a classic example of the opposite of, "too good to be true." Not really. The news is too terrible to be true. That might be the penultimate bottom line. You might say that the news on KOOP, as of November, 2000, stinks and you'd be 100% correct. You don't need to actually read any of the stories from day one. The chart and the headlines are sufficient. Everything started day one with the IPO...

To be continued. Click here.

*News story about the Ethics Initiative.Wednesday November 1,http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/001101/tx_drkoop_.html