These are some random musings gathered from a meeting I attended in South America last week. In attendance at a cocktail party were senior people from the wolrd's largest oil company, the largest oil company in SA, and an investor, who runs over $20 billion in investments. These people started talking of the impact of the Year 200o, as it pertained to them.
Being very nosy, I asked a lot of questions, and I really could not believe some of the answers. The chap from the world's largest oil company told me that they were up to their eyeballs with the problem, and were suprised that Wall Street didn't really understand the problem. The chap from SA, couldn't care less about Wall Street, but said that the problem with his firm were a very important concern, and it was occupying a large amount of his time.
The chap running large pool of capital said over and over again, that most of the firms that he was involved with would not comment publicly on their position vis a vis Y2K, but due to the lack of budgeting at the beginning of 1997, you will see the floodgates open very wide in 1st and 2nd qtr next year. He also mentioned that his firm had done massive DD on this problem, and that they had found 6-7 firms which were household names, who would not have the problem solved by 12/31/99, and he was speculating on what would happen when the time came. It was a pretty scary scenario from a very bright chap. He has instructed his various managers, that every company in the portfolio should have an assesment compiled by his firm by 3/98 on exactly where they stand, or they would take action.
I mentioned my interest in TPRO, and the reaction was very interesting from 2 of the gentlemen who were very aware of TPRO. I did try to get specific, but to no avail, as I had not gotten that much wine into them at that moment in time.
I did get together the next day with the chap running the large pool of capital, and he went into specifics of the problem in some detail. He mentioned that the other 2 gentlemen would not talk in front of me concerning their problems in their firms, but they were significant.
He strongly suggested owning a portfolio of Y2K stocks, as part of an insurance package, because his feeling was that the problem is going to get much more publicity, and it will happen in a hurry when it does, and Wall Street, being a bunch of lemmings, will take the whole group when it really gets going. His feeling was that the group will be a market leader in 1998, and a package approach would be the snesible way of playing it. We spent over an hour on TPRO, and he took a lot of notes, and had his firm pull down all the research notes from this board.
The bottom line to me was that these were 3 very bright, big people, and they convinced me that this problem is VERY REAL. |
