> I think for me as an investor, it's always good to be
> cautious and conservative than to assume that company is always
> going to sustain the kind of explosive growth in the past.
You are correct. Indeed, I am usually more of a "value" than a "growth" investor -- but to me it seems fairly certain that while we cannot say what exactly NTAP's growth rate will be, they will be making much much more money five years from now than they are now. Let's say, at least twice as much money. This is not true for all companies, but to me, subjectively, it's true for NTAP. So given those sorts of long-term intuitions, one has to figure out what the worst case scenario is... in the case of NTAP, the worst case scenario for October 2003 seems to be that PE is 30 and earnings are twice what they are now (which btw would be only a compounding ltgr of 15% or so), which would mean the stock price would be where it is now. That's not great, but it's not such a bad worst case. |
