lol!!!
c'mon...let's start an email campaign directed at CNBS...
Or in other words, we don't care if General Motors
(GM:NYSE - news) and Ford (F:NYSE - news) are
going with Oracle (ORCL:Nasdaq - news) or with i2
(ITWO:Nasdaq - news) for their new parts
procurement process. We don't want to own GM or
Ford on any occasion. In fact, we would rather own
the loser in that tech bake-off than the winner in
nontech, because in this new world, there is so
much business to be done for the i2s and the
Oracles that the capital will remain plentiful for
them, win or lose a particular piece of business.
Just yesterday I found myself wishing I had bought
i2 when it lost out to Oracle for the giant
business-to-business contract for the Big Three
automakers. Others had the same idea because i2,
the loser Friday, was up much more Monday than
GM and Ford could be this year. i2 can own the
world because the company with the access to
cheap capital always wins. And the companies with
no access have to lose.
Or, closer to home. We in the stock market don't
care that The Street.com Inc. (TSCM:Nasdaq -
news), a company I helped create, has built a
compelling new brand, has more than 100,000 paid
subscribers and has $100 million in the bank. We
just want to know which companies TheStreet.com
employs to publish each day. We want to know
who the host is, which publishing tool works best,
which wireless strategy TheStreet.com is adopting
and how does it automate its email? (By the way,
the answers are Exodus, Vignette (VIGN:Nasdaq -
news), Motorola (MOT:NYSE - news) and Kana
(KANA:Nasdaq - news) -- all at or near their
52-week highs as TheStreet.com languishes at its
52-week low, a triumph of the arms merchants over
the combatants if there ever were one.)
How did this bizarro world where nine-tenths of the
companies I have followed as a stock picker for the
last 20 years are losers and one-tenth are winners?
To answer that question, you have to throw out all of
the matrices and formulas and texts that existed
before the Web. You have to throw them away
because they can't make money for you anymore,
and that is all that matters. We don't use
price-to-earnings multiples anymore at Cramer
Berkowitz. If we talk about price-to-book, we have
already gone astray. If we use any of what Graham
and Dodd teach us, we wouldn't have a dime under
management. |
