Post-vacation thoughts
For those of you who don't read the dead-tree version of Red Herring, I believe you are missing out on a lot of stuff about technology. Sometimes you have to read in between the lines to put it in the perspective of GGaming. Sometimes not.
I did some (not all) of my catch-up reading on airplanes. I was reminded how terrific Red Herring is. The June issue about DoCoMo's I-mode phones is a keeper. For those wondering how Intel is using their multi-billion dollar warchest to gain more than a toe-hold in the post-PC era (did I use enough hyphenated words?), the same issue has a great article. For those like me who feel Microsoft has not clearly articulated their .Net strategy, the Gates interview and a side-bar explanation of it in the September issue is a must for getting a clear understanding of it. And that issue also has a great interview with Dr. J which has some great nuggets, such as "I have no idea how that rumor [of a merger with Nokia] got started," and "GSM and TDMA won't go away. They will be used by over a billion people before anything else begins to replace it." Heck, if Dr. J can be happy with that, so can I. I look forward to reading the three other issues I still haven't gotten to.
Change of subject. :)
Purely as a point of enjoyment, this long-term investor likes to value his portfolio at the end of every trading day. Doing it upon return from vacation for the first time in nearly two weeks reminded me of how much fun and equally unimportant the exercise is.
In that context while being sensitive to the fact that some people in the thread are unhappy about the value of their portfolio relative to earlier highs this year, I still maintain that comparisons with a date of an earlier high and with the value on the first day of the year are worse than short-term views; they are founded on nothing more than arbitrary dates with no meaning whatsoever.
I decided (again, for fun!) to test that theory with anecdotal evidence of my own portfolio by looking up the 52-week lows of the six stocks I own. Five of them in alphabetical order:
STOCK 52-week low Current Change
Cisco $32.53 $66.25 +104%
EMC $29.00 $99.31 +240%
Gemstar $29.59 $79.44 +168%
Qualcomm $38.07 $64.13 +68%
Siebel $31.84 $197.25 +519%
The 6th stock requires a more detailed explanation. At the begining of the year I owned Citrix. (Stop laughing. :) I sold that very near its 52-week low after having fallen 85% from its 52-week high. I bought SanDisk with the proceeds. Having risen nicely in a very short period of time, the total value of that 6th position now in SanDisk is still 76% lower than its 52-week high when it was in Citrix.
Despite the Citrix debacle of 2000, my portfolio is thankfully down only 13% thanks to diversification and some great luck. All the other investments in common stock as an unweighted average are up a whopping 220% from their 52-week lows.
I will quickly concede that this exercise comparing current values with 52-week lows is no more meaningful than comparisons with year-earlier highs and values as of January 1. However, the comparisons at least do show that if you are feeling bad about the value of your portfolio using aribitrary dates, it might help your emotions to look at all the arbitrary dates rather than focusing only on the ones that make you think your stocks are in the tank. On the whole (even including a disaster of sorts such as the one with Citrix), your stocks may indeed be doing just great as I believe mine are.
--Mike Buckley |
