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Technology Stocks : Network Associates (NET) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kormac who wrote (5420)	6/30/1999 12:47:00 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6021

The question is, fair to whom and by what criteria? You can say "using this measure and this criteria, the stock is undervalued." But you either have to use entirely past data and completely ignore what might happen tomorrow, or you have to use projections which can never be anything more than educated guesses and by definition cannot take into account the unknown. I know of no intelligent stock picker who works entirely on the basis of historical data. All I know try to peer into the future. This removes any possibility of truly objective valuation and makes everything subjective. And when all is subjective, fair value is purely in the eye of the beholder. I may think that Microsoft is the "cheapest" stock in the market. But at least some other people obviously disagree, or they would be buying up the stock and bringing up its price. What, then, is its fair value other than the price it is trading for? What makes a market is that people disagree on what the fair value of a stock is. Your fair value and my fair value differ. Who is right? What is the "true" fair value? How do you even define it other than the current stock price??