Todays Barrons:
Slightly more upbeat is Tony Rizza, portfolio manager with Columbus Circle
Investors, which run the Pimco Innovation Fund. Rizza says his fund cut back
holdings in stocks with large Asian exposure when the crisis cropped up last
October. The strategy paid off through Thursday, as the fund had a
market-beating year-to-date gain of about 20%.
Rizza says the fund has concentrated on companies with a U.S. focus, and those with proprietary products. A year ago, he cut back on chip stocks, including Motorola, and beefed up positions in Microsoft, AOL, Cisco and Yahoo. The right stocks to own, as it turned out. And he's sticking with the strategy.
Still, Rizza has been searching for new ideas. For instance, he thinks the time has come to buy Compaq. The PC maker, he says, has completed the Digital Equipment acquisition, and survived the PC inventory correction without any major earnings disappointments and without losing its position as the world's leading PC company.
Were his fund flooded with cash, Rizza says, he'd beef
up his largest positions: AOL, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel and Dell, which together
account for about 30% of the fund's $400 million fund in assets.
"What I'm trying to do is buy companies that won't be negatively surprising,
companies with an upward bias to their fundamentals," he says.
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