Dividends
Edited by Toddi Gutner
The Stat
8% of the top five officers of small and mid-size companies were given country club memberships as a perk in 2002, down from 54% in 1998. The data are based on 1,031 companies in 2002 and 1,068 in 1998.
Data: Sibson Consulting
EQUITIES
INTERNET STOCKS
We Told You So
Back in August, the idea of recommending Internet stocks struck many people as nuts. But in the six months since we launched BusinessWeek's Real World Internet Index (BW--Sept. 2), this 20-stock index has risen 11.7%, beating the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by 22.1 percentage points. Funny what a hot online Christmas will do.
The best performers are Amazon.com (AMZN
), online auction site eBay (EBAY
), and distance-learning leader University of Phoenix Online (UOPX
). They're up 32% to 46% since Aug. 16, when we began. The index was up over 30% in late fall, but a weak early 2003 and earnings misses from Hotels.com, 1-800-Flowers.com (FLWS
), and eSpeed (ESPD
) pulled it back.
Net stocks are still volatile, but there are more good ones than people think. Acquirers think so: Index members Ticketmaster, McAfee.com, and Paypal were sold since August. To replace them, we're adding Yahoo! (YHOO
), Network Associates (NET
), and Digital River (DRIV
). Not every dot-com is worth buying, but the Net's promises are slowly but surely being kept.
By Timothy J. Mullaney
MUSIC
Retro Grooves
These recordable CDs look like vintage 45s
 It has the look and feel of an old 45, right down to the pasted-on label and black vinyl grooves. But turn over a Digital Vinyl CD from Verbatim and there's a blank, recordable disk that holds 80 minutes of your own tunes burned on any CD-R drive. A 10-pack blast from the past is $5.
TAXES
Small Change
By now, you should have received a stack of 1099 forms reporting all your interest, dividends, and capital gains for 2002. Well, maybe not all of them. Stray mutual-fund, bank, and brokerage accounts that earned $9 or less are not required to send out 1099s. But remember: You still must include those small amounts as part of your taxable income.
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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