Fund Manager Highlights TCP
TIP SHEET: Orbitex's Ellis Likes Telecom ADRs
By CHRISTOPHER GRIMES
Dow Jones Newswires
NEW YORK -- Only a few months ago, Craig Ellis couldn't buy enough
Internet stocks.
But vertigo finally got the best of Ellis, manager of Orbitex's $55
million Infotech fund. He says he grew tired of worrying at nights about
his large positions in stocks like Verticalnet Inc. (VERT), RealNetworks
Inc. (RNWK) and Priceline.com Inc. (PCLN).
"I've weaned myself off of momentum investing with the Internet names,"
Ellis said. "We were all playing craps, and we were all going home
saying 'I hope seven doesn't come up in the morning.' It was time to
flow elsehwere."
For Ellis, elsewhere right now means Latin America and Asia.
Asked for three favorite stocks, Ellis named four: Telecomunicacoes
Brasileiras S.A. (TBH), Telesp Celular Participacoes SSA (TCP), Nippon
Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT) and China Telecom Ltd. (CHL).
Obviously, the man enjoys to invest along thematic lines. He says
telephone penetration in China and parts of Latin America is fairly
thin, so cellular phones "are going to be the mechanism that gets
(telephones) into the hands of the public the fastest."
He calls Telesp Celular "a pure cellular play on Latin America," and he
said China Telecom's business is similarly cell-centric. And while he's
concerned about some bumpiness in the near future with Nippon, he's
optimistic the stock will find reasons to go up.
"They're facing competitive issues, dealing with efficiency for the
first time," he said. "There might be some spinoffs. It's a very
interesting stock here."
Ellis has his investing strategy mapped out, at least until late summer.
He anticipates buying a lot of computer hardware stocks - particularly
semiconductor shares - in September. He already holds shares of Applied
Materials Inc. (AMAT), the big chip equipment maker.
Why wait to buy other computer hardware stocks?
"This summer could be tough on tech stocks, as summers have been
traditionally," he said. "Looking at my crystal ball, come September,
I'm going to be deeply weighted in hardware."
But he isn't likely to come back to Internet stocks any time soon.
"I think the area you need to be leery of is big- cap internet names,"
he said, mentioning America Online Inc. (AOL), Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) and
Amazon.com. Inc. (AMZN) "I just don't see what the catalyst is for them
to jump again."
-Christopher Grimes (201) 938-5253 |
