Re: Wind River, Systemsoft, and Qualcomm
If you examine the 100 week chart at techstocks.com, you'll find one big winner (Wind River), one big loser (SystemSoft), and one chunk of dead money (Qualcomm). This is about what you'd expect if you picked 3 tech stocks at random 2 years ago. It bothers me that so many people on this thread consult Allen Benn as if he were a divine oracle merely because he's a brilliant writer. He needed a debacle like SystemSoft to teach him humility, but he still needs to work on his age bigotry. A close look at the management of Microsoft, Dell, and Sun Microsystems would be in order.
You should consider the issues Allen raises, but take it with a grain of salt and bear in mind that he operates under the fallacious belief that you can't make big money without taking big risks. Do your own research and discuss your findings with him and others, but don't be lazy and rely solely on the their advice.
If you insist on following a guru, I suggest a former Intel process engineer, Paul Engel, who writes on the x86 processor threads. He doesn't write half as well as Allen and he's twice as pugnacious as me, but the fact remains that he's the smartest contributor to SI. His picks are at siliconinvestor.com
I don't pick for '99 - but I do buy stocks for the long haul.
These stocks included Intel, Altera, Xilinx, Qualcomm, Sun Micro, PRI Automation, Applied Materials, EMC, Microsoft, Compaq, Ciena and quite a few others.
I don't own any Dell - I sure wish I did. I sold my Cisco but still consider it a long term winner.
Although he has written extensively on I2O, Wind River is curiously absent from the list. SystemSoft is absent despite the fact that Intel is one of the biggest shareholders. Although Qualcomm has been dead money for 100 weeks, the recent sharp drop has squeezed out excessive exuberance and the stock is a reasonable value. It's far more likely to rise than Wind River and SystemSoft.
Qualcomm's recent announcement is a mere hiccup that is experienced by every growing company, but SystemSoft revealed deep structural problems. Wind River would also be reporting hiccups if they weren't playing "hockey stick" accounting games, but investors won't be fooled indefinitely. As Allen alluded to in his discussion of SystemSoft, the character of the management is an important consideration in choosing stocks for your portfolio. |
