Frank,
Sorry. Though I'm enamored with The Gospel According to Gorillas, I'm not quite as enamored with it as you apparently are. Perhaps that's why you deserve the title, King Arthur. :)
The real purpose of the gorilla game (is) to help private investors participate in the rewards of high-tech stock gains while standing clear of the market's unnerving volatility.
I've never understood that comment. If Cisco's and Intel's drops aren't unnerving volatility, how volatile does a stock have to be to be deemed unnerving?
Gorilla game investors should never get trapped by false hypergrowth because they invest based on actual revenues, not projections of boom markets to come.
The investment thesis is to buy baskets of gorilla wannabes, many if not most of whom experience reduction of growth of revenue if not reduction of actual revenue at some point in time before becoming a gorilla. Investing in a company with 10 quarters of great revenue growth followed by a few quarters of lower revenue certainly makes this investor feel trapped when it happens to him.
For private investors with limited capital and a high sensitivity to risk, the gorilla is the only safe buy in the category, that all the other investments incur a much higher risk of eventually disappointing drastically.
I wouldn't call an investment in any high-tech company "safe." I realize you consider Softie a guaranteed investment with 85% annual return (Do I remember the number correctly?), but I don't.
(The GG) uses consolidation, not diversification, as its primary risk reduction strategy for long term holds.
I don't think the manual offers enough back testing of that thesis to validate it to the point of being beyond a shadow of a doubt. One primary issue is that the manual speaks primarily (only?) to the issues of computer high-techs. I wonder what the data shows about gorillas in other high-tech industries.
Perhaps my comments are nothing more than subconscious justifications of my investment in Fastenal, a company that sells nuts and bolts. Year-to-date, that investment is doing as well or better than my investments in Excite@Home (an Internut!), Cisco, Citrix, and EMC.
--Mike Buckley |
