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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (3332)	6/30/1999 8:20:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

This Month in the Front Office -- Part 2 The Stocks Let's get right to one very impressive set of numbers! History Year Quarter Month Gorilla Game 94.07% 76.61% 46.46% 38.96% S&P 500 23.61% 11.65% 6.71% 5.44% Russell 2000 -1.15% 8.46% 15.10% 4.33% Our Front Office Gorilla Game is up almost 40% just in the month of June. That's nearly half the profit we show for the entire 13 months we've been playing the game. There's no question that we are enjoying another upwardly volatile period when we're simply knocking the socks off the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000, the latter of which is STILL not profitable in the 13 months we've been playing this game. When you read that the small caps aren't doing well as demonstrated by the Russell 2000, remember that all small caps don't perform alike. Perhaps, just maybe, those who pick their small caps using gorilla-game hunting criteria will do better than the indexes over time. (Okay, I'll now turn my sarcasm mode to the "off" position.) The Russell's 15% advance in Q2 is impressive, but it needed that just to get BACK to a 1% loss for the 13 months we've been playing the game. And during the quarter that it moved upward 15%, our Game advanced 46%. Perhaps the most important perspective is that some of our gaming stocks may no longer be small caps a year from now. The largest of them, Siebel Systems, already sports a $6 billion market cap and should at the very least be considered a mid-cap stock if that level holds. Ah, but when we "bought" Siebel it was only one-third that size. That's what gorilla gaming is all about, watching wannabe gorillas grow in stature along with their stock price. Let's take a look at the stock-by-stock data: Shares Current 5/25/98 5/1/99 Change Now % of Buy Buy Average Current from Owned Company Portfolio Price Price Cost Price 5/25/98 62 Clarify 13.2% $13.25 N/A $13.25 $41.25 211.32% 225 Remedy 31.2% $17.44 $17.50 $17.46 $26.88 54.10% 147 Siebel 50.3% $23.00 $38.44 $27.10 $66.38 188.61% 90 Vantive 5.3% $27.63 N/A $27.63 $11.44 -58.60% Looking at those numbers, a smile comes to my face when I see that two of the four stocks are approximate three-baggers in only 13 months. Notice also that the stocks of Remedy and Siebel, the dominant leaders in their respecitve areas of the front office, have the lion's share of our Gorilla Game. That's as it should be, in theory. So far, it's working. However, our portfolio's value would be slightly higher had I not sold some of the Clarify shares a little more than a month ago and used the funds to buy more Remedy and Siebel shares. But that's only a short time ago. It'll be interesting to see what playing the gorilla game by the rules teaches us a year or more down the road, ummm, down the jungle path. Now, the totals: Stocks $19,391.61 Cash $15.61 Total $19,407.22 And the formalities: Hey, it's only a game! This is not a real-money portfolio. The Front Office Gorilla Game began on 5/25/98 with $10,000. Commissions are based on $8 per trade. Because interest on the cash position is immaterial to the success of the portfolio, it is not accounted for. Disclosure: I own shares of Siebel Systems, one of the stocks in the portfolio, and have owned short and long positions in the Gorilla Game stocks and other front office software stocks. I will consider real-money positions in the stocks shown above. I've made and lost money investing and speculating in these and other front office software stocks, so do your own homework. And good luck! --Mike Buckley