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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates

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To: hueyone who wrote (30261)8/22/2000 1:00:34 AM
From: Mike Buckley  Read Replies (2) of 54805
 
Huey,

Great leading questions. :)

The research firms are independent. Their business models are primarily based on gathering info and producing reports to be sold to investors and business managers.

My take on research firms is that they are to a particular industry or subsector what an analyst is to a company. They make projections and have no problems changing them (rightfully so) when new information becomes available.

As for back-testing, I'm not sure it would do a lot of good because we shouldn't take anything except the very biggest picture too seriously when it comes to predicting the future. There can be huge differences in projections between what one research firm says about an industry's expected growth and what another one says. As an example, IDC pegged 1999 CRM sales at $1.68 billion and AMR pegged it 121% greater at $3.72 billion. Those wildly different estimates were made THIS year about LAST year's performance! Imagine how far off they might be in the future when they disagree so much about the past.

The stuff that I find most reliable and helpful from the research firms' press releases (I've never bought one of their reports) is the stuff about a particular firm's marketshare. Because dominance is a key focal point in this folder, that's a critical area in which I've found research from those firms to be often very helpful.

Hope this helps. Maybe others have more to say about it.

--Mike Buckley
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