Not all dot.coms created equal

Wednesday, April 5th 2000, 12:00AM

Although technology investments, particularly website IPOs, are in vogue with investors, not all are overwhelmingly successful.

In the past 10 days the Beauty Direct offer closed early as it was heavily oversubscribed Then it made a successful debut on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Beauty Direct, an online cosmetics store, aimed to raise $2.5 million through an IPO and ended up closing the offer after just 8 days as it was heavily oversubscribed.

What's more the company raised an extra $1 million through oversubscriptions.

However, financial services business MoneyOnLine failed to find huge support.

The company, which was aiming to raise $1.5 million, only pulled in $500,000 from a total of 170 investors.

MoneyOnLine (formerly Global Register) is run by former BNZ adviser John Commins. It has a number of businesses including the sales of managed funds and insurance over the Internet.

Commins says he is pleased with the number of investors subscribing to the float.

The money raised will be used to further develop existing business in managed funds distribution and other online consumer financial services.

Currently MoneyOnLine has about $17 million invested in a range of unit trusts. While it earns no up front or monitoring fees on the money it does get paid an annual trail commission of about 0.25 per cent annually for inforce business.

MoneyOnLine isn’t listed on any market other than iexchange.co.nz, a site owned by the company and designed to make a market in the stock by matching buyers and sellers.

The latest Internet company raising money in the market is Christchurch-based e-tailer EstarOnline. EstarOnline, which sells CDs through CD store is wanting to raise $10 million to use for marketing purposes.

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