And another......
Hubris? Or Just Common Sense?
By James J. Cramer
Originally posted at 7:52 AM ET 12/20/00 on RealMoney.com
One of the more angry emails I got yesterday asked who am I to be more negative about spending for telcos than the likes of the good people who run JDS Uniphase (JDSU:Nasdaq - news) and Corning Glass (GLW:NYSE - news) and Sycamore (SCMR:Nasdaq - news). For them to be bullish and Cramer to be bearish, this correspondent says, is the height of hubris. He blasted me for being a blowhard and an arrogant joker.
Hey, I get it. I mean, basically, I am nobody. I don't make fiber equipment or sell it. I am not in the trenches of the CLECs and I am not under the streets of New York putting in concentric networks or Monterey products or rings or meshes for that matter. I am someone who takes peoples' money and makes more money with it. (Alert Dante, Cramer's coming!)
I make that money by predicting what is going to happen. I have made hundreds of millions of dollars over many years by predicting what will happen. In good and bad times.
My job is not to listen to the likes of JDS Uniphase and Corning Glass and do what they say. My job is to figure out if they are right. If they are right, and their stocks don't reflect it, I bet with them. If they are wrong and their stocks don't reflect it, I bet against them. That's what I do.
Does that make me arrogant? I don't know. I think it makes me good.
I wrote negatively about these stocks because I put the problems of the bond market (no financing, get the Lehman Brothers' Fixed Income Report on capex if you want to learn more) together with the glowing forecasts from the people who needed the bond market to be good (the telcos and their providers) and said something doesn't add up.
I had felt terribly that, when I knew the semiconductor market wasn't any good, I wasn't negative enough. I wasn't going to make that mistake twice when it came to the telcos.
If I came off as arrogant in the face of the losses that people are suffering I am truly sorry. But I thought it was more important to keep you from losing money and I wanted to be adamant about it after being tepid about how bad the semis were.
Hubris in the face of losses is no vice? Whatever. I apologize. Just trying to show you what I was doing at my job and save you a couple of bucks so you can stay in the game.
Random musings: Is Warren Buffett building a portfolio of asbestos-related properties? He buys Johns Manville this morning. ... Congratulations to Tom Brown for nailing First Union a couple of years back. Man, that's a nasty dividend cut. |
