Bottom Feeder.(Li Ka-Shing invests in Priceline.com)(Brief Article)

Hong Kong supertycoon Li Ka-Shing has made many daring moves in a fabled career. Last week he did it again, reaching into the rubble of a decimated dot-com landscape and plucking out a $110 million stake in Priceline, the online sales giant. The buy increases Li's stake to 30 percent, at a time when many investors still regard dot-coms as fool's gold.

Li has a way of conjuring the real thing. His buy into Priceline sparked a run on shares that hiked the stock price 41 percent--only the latest sign of hope that the tech-market crash has hit bottom. "Before the bubble burst, it was buy everything at any price," says Steven Weinstein of Pacific Crest Securities. "Now you're seeing people picking through the rubble saying, 'OK, is there anything worth anything?' The answer is yes. Just because something has a dot-com doesn't mean it's bad."

What's good? Priceline is one of several online travel agents on the rebound. Expedia is up 259 percent for the year, to $34. Travelocity has risen 164 percent to $32. While Amazon continues to flounder, a few e-tailers are doing well: Home Stores spiked 40 percent; eBay is up 95 percent. And the trajectory of basic-service providers like AOL (up 40 percent) and EarthLink (up 128 percent) suggests that fundamental faith in the power of the Internet is reviving as well, for sound reasons. Expedia and Travelocity are turning a profit.

Still, it's hard to remove the dot-bomb stink from Priceline. Founded in 1997 by Jay Walker, a magazine-subscription entrepreneur, Priceline set out to turn the art of the sale on its head. It allowed customers to set their own price for airline tickets, then went searching for an airline to fill the ...