VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

The Most Direct Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy

The roaring success of the U.S. stock markets is now a feature of nearly all newscasts. Hundreds of millions of shares change hands daily. Ten of millions of investors study the financial pages of the morning paper and often discuss "the market" with friends. Their savings and shares of their pension funds flow every day into both old and new businesses with good prospects. Even Berkshire Hathaway, at $36,000+ the priciest share on the New York Stock Exchange and one that pays NO dividend, trades daily in appreciable volume.

None of this would be possible without information, accurate, detailed, up-to-the-minute information about the present and past condition of individual companies and their industries. Such information has been accumulating for decades, even centuries in some cases, and key roles have been played by independent lawyers, doctors, accountants, investment advisors, and scientists serving these companies.

But this information is worthless until it reaches investors, and the size of the delivery system that has grown up since Charles Dow and Edward Jones started The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than 100 years ago is staggering. Reuters, a British-based company, employs nearly 2,000 journalists in 161 news bureaus around the world to serve 340,200 customers. Telerate, Dow Jones's unit, collects information from 2,000 banks and exchanges and more than 2,000 other providers to serve 94,500 customers. Bloomberg News, with 70 news bureaus and a computer library that uses 800 separate categories of information to analyze 65,000 corporations, serves 73,000 customers. And the most important thing about the system is that its facts are available directly to investors at the touch of a computer key; they don't have to go through agents to get it. This sort of system is what it takes to attract investment capital in large quantities.

So what system serves investors in the forestry sector? One worse than or as bad as the system in stocks when Dow and Jones started in the 1890s. Our system for market information has four big faults:

1. With one exception, prices are reported only as averages over wide areas at 3- or 12-month intervals. They may be useful as history, but help little with deciding whether to accept a buyer's offer today.

2. With one exception, prices are reported only as averages per cord or MBF. The reports never mention the big effect of DBH even when trees are to be manufactured into the same product. They seem unaware that the following stumpage-price relationship is common:

3. With one exception, detailed volumes of each sale with county and state location are not published.

4. With one exception, market information is available only through agents or reporting services, never free at the touch of a computer key.

The single exception is JMV&CO's Web site: www.vardaman.com. You can get to the information after a free registration; if you forget your password, ask the computer to give it to you again. If you still can't find the value you need, call us at 800+455-4568; we'll furnish it without charge.

We will continue to expand this service. We may never become a Reuters, a Dow Jones, or a Bloomberg, but we are determined to furnish the market information that's now so sadly lacking. The potential return for investors is too high; the demand for the trees by society is too great.