Scott,
Like John, I happen to be a scientific type and I would like to propose an experiment.
Put together a $100,000 portfolio composed of your technology stokcs. I will pick do the same from the list of four biotechnology stocks you listed (I'll taken an even weighting of SEPR, INCY and MLNM). Let's see who's ahead in about 1 year or so. You can pick the date as long as it's reasonable.
I'll even donate US$1,000 to a suitable charity to properly demonstrate my humility if you win (actually, I feel pretty humble already after adding to my Sepracor position on Monday and getting whacked with a baseball bat on Tuesday :-)).
Incidentally, your calculations naturally use past performance of the various issues. Unfortunately, I can find lots of reasons for Lucent, Intel, Northern Telecom and Cisco being down. But I cannot find equally good reasons why Sepracor, Incyte and Millennium Pharmaceuticals went down by that much. My gut feeling - and even scientists have such a thing from time to time - is that the latter are down partially because the former are. I do not feel a burning need to work out the numbers, but I'm pretty sure there is at least a statistical correlation if not a direct causal relationship.
All this is just my opinion. I do not claim to know a whole lot. My academic background is in Computer Science and Mathematics and I never took anywhere near enough Biology.
Torben |
