Hi John, boy! that's maybe the toughest question of them all. I'm sure many of us here on SI have spent many a quiet drive thinking and wondering about the answer to that. I think it was Peter Lynch who said, when an industry is changing and growing at spectacular rates, until you see a clear winner emerge, pick the biggest companies who are leading that industry.
That leaves of course, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco. I don't believe however, that means we should ignore so many other fine companies which are uniquely positioning themselves to benifit from this sea change.
So, who is also uniquely positioned?
In the Semi's, it looks like Altera and Xilinx are very well positioned.
In the plumbing area, it looks like Lucent and Ascend are positioning themselves well. I wouldn't count Fore out either. And of course as Paul has mentioned their's Ipsilon, just waiting in the wings causing Cisco headaches. Coms also seems to have it's own large niche here.
Althought their PE still scares me, I don't believe you can dismiss Netscape, after all, they are to a large degree what has made all this possible.
ISP's and Search Engines make everything work. So American Online and Yahoo, should continue to do pretty well. Allot of people want simple answers and American Online provides it. Yahoo, just seems to be everywhere on the net, giving people what they want.
Buying products over the net, I believe is going to have a huge future. So probably, Amazon will continue to grow considerably.
There is also an obscure industry on the net which many people don't know exists yet. The web page database developers. As more and more products continue to be bought over the net. How those pages look, feel, and store information is going to be very important. No company has gone public yet, but the largest is about to in November. Called Neoglyphics. I will be buying that company at the earliest opportunity.
Bear in mind, I don't necessarily think you should buy these stocks now, only that they are likely to benifit from the Internet long term.
I would be interested to here your views as well as the rest of the threads on this important topic.
Michael
|
