Chaz
Understand your reasoning regarding NTAP however I don't think it will be dead money. Certainly if playing the game purely by the rules, one is probably not invested here, however I think most of us like to keep positions outside the pure gorillas as long as they perform/hold promise. The true gorillas being awfully few and far between.
I think Downsouth could probably address your concerns regarding the technology and market size better than me (actually I'm quite sure of that). However two things strike me as interesting. I think the Dell factor is only now coming into play. FWIW the big Dell newspaper adds are featuring the storage solutions more prominently now. I suspect Dell is looking to move in this area - can't be bad for NTAP. In addition, while EMC is certainly a lot bigger, I believe that NTAP's marketspace does in fact show quite a bit of promise. The last quarterly report was quite solid - seems to me it wouldn't be overly aggressive to hold and wait to see if the growth trend continues. I've not heard anything from management to indicate otherwise. Note, I don't think a comparison with IOMEGA is valid. They are a completely different company, with very much a retail one trick pony product line IMO.
As far as what to hold as a single best idea for the next year, I'm sure we could do a survey on the thread (maybe we should) and come up with a host of good suggestions. I suspect QCOM would top the list. I don't necessarily think in this fashion. I don't see it as necessary to pick the number one stock each year in order to be successful. I think if one sticks with the tech/internet/bandwidth/connectivity demand theme however there are a host of great firms with potential royalty status (relatively few possible gorillas though). Personnally, my money is on QCOM, JDSU, PMCS (there's a few others worthy here also), CSCO (thinking of LU/NT) and WCOM, the latter purely a function of wanting to be in the service provider space, and a bet on superior management. (The stock has lagged this year also, so one of these days it will probably catch fire). Overall, I think QCOM remains extremely attractive going forward, although not without risk if the company does not execute as well as we all expect.
I'm holding NTAP for now, and expect we will move to new highs once the market nervousness is over and the growth trend is confirmed as intact.
mariner
PS: A while back I brought up the subject of electronic bill presentment and payment as the possible next "killer app." I see Checkfree has gone through a decent correction of late. I'm wondering if anyone else has thoughts regarding EBPP generally and where they might be placing their bets. Suspect this could be a very exciting area over the next year - in fact we should see tremendous growth here going forward I think. Somebody must be planning to make some money on this somehow! |
