Ashton Technology Group (fka ASTN)

[sarals]

comments on todays pr
by: kcmillpe
Long-Term Sentiment: Hold 07/09/01 07:02 pm
Msg: 124027 of 124110

text from the pr follows with comments in parenthesis ....

Salaries and benefits totaled $5.8 million and $3.6 million in the years ended March 31, 2001 and 2000, respectively, as staff increased from 43 to 56 employees. Approximately $1.6 million and $.3 million was paid for outsourced labor in the years ended March 31, 2001 and 2000, respectively.

(it was commented by another today that the average salary is exhorbitant. it isnt. the average for salary AND benefits averaged about 100k per employee. a standard mark-up for an hourly employee is in the 1.5 to 2.1 range. benefits arent cheap, and you have at least a 7.5% mark-up on social security alone. 100k/1.5 is more like 67k per year salary. considering the few high dollar people we know about, seems to me that they must have a number of people not making very much money at all. the average salary is emminently reasonable from this stockholders perspective.

my experience with consulting fees is they run from 55-110 per hour in the engineering market. i speculate they had between 5 to 10 contractors working on a full time basis over the period ending 3/31/01. depending on the why and how of using contract labor, it can be a very good or a very bad thing.)

In addition, during the year ended March 31, 2001, losses on trading activities relating to ATG Trading LLC includes $.3 million in net realized losses on trades, and $.6 million in related broker commissions, execution and clearing charges.

(i'm pretty happy to see the trade losses were so low. i cant for the life of me understand how they could provide contraside liquidity on their own and then profit from it by trading against it during the day. strikes me as betting against the house in vegas - the odds are against you. i speculate from the remarks in a previous fwf that this was the result of an experiment that stopped some time back)

http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&board=4687979&tid=astn&sid=4687979&action=m&...