The paths of glory lead but tho the grave, Bux. I know that what many people are now after is "ten-baggers", to use the American idiom (and when a popular expresssion describing shares that are expected to rise by 1'000% enters the language, you know that trouble will follow). This summer's biggest hit at ABC is something called "Who wants to be a millionaire?". Barbra Streisand is handling Donna Karan's internet stock portfolio. The upshot: there's a bad moon rising.
I need 6-8 telecom related stock picks - and I need to get them right. Right for the good times and right for the bad times. Let's look at my 1999. The turn-around pick for the first six months of the year was Motorola, the long-term pick was Nokia. Ericsson started looking good last August. High-risk picks were Voicestream and Omnipoint. The details and timing for these picks are you-know-where.
How many people took a risk on VSTR and OMPT last January, bux? How many called the mobile operator M&A situation of this year and predicted the implications on operator share prices? If you want to judge my performance - why not take on the whole hog? And why not include the call on Iridium and Globalstar while you're at it?
Guess what? That whole hog is enough. Enough to beat Nasdaq, enough to beat S&P, enough to keep my job. And that will do. Because in the long term, nearly all who attempt to outperform indexes, fail. Any year that you beat the blind monkey is a good year. And most people who chase after the Qualcomms and Webvans of this world tend to catch Globalstars and Iomegas as well... which they conveniently forget.
I do what I do - America is full of people who can offer insights to the next "ten-bagger". I'm not into that. And we'll look at the final scoreboard after five years. Not a day before that - certainly not during this fall's manic period. As far as what is the most "lucrative" stock... I don't care. Safety and long-term profit picture are more important. That's something which is easy to forget in these times of P/E ratios around 200. Do I like stocks with P/E ratios zooming above 200? Hell, no. I want shares that earn their premiums. Call it Lutheran capitalism. The expectations built into shares during these days of orgastic speculative frenzy have to be justified at some point. The day of reckoning draws nigh.
Tero |
