Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Non-Tech : Knight/Trimark Group, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dennis michael patterson who wrote (2196)	7/10/1999 1:18:00 PM
From: Hyperpy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10027

Barron's artical today . Read NO NITE in site All tulips may grow to the sky, but pardon our panel if they don't hitch a ride, at least on the .com du jour. If a theme emerged from the nine hours of good-natured if occasionally sharp verbal jousting that constituted last Monday's 31st annual meeting of Barron's Roundtable, it was, the immortal words of John Neff, "It's the valuations, stupid." Not that the nine Wall Street luminaries who subjected themselves to grilling by a gang of this magazine's editors agreed on much else. The economy will grow not at all, imperceptibly or actually hum along; rates will be up or down; profits, plentiful or scarcely a pittance. Japan and Brazil will get their acts together, or not. And the stock market -- well, that depends on how you slice and dice it. No one is looking for Armageddon. The more bearish members of the crew expect that corrections in the major averages will be contained in the gentlemanly 10%-15% range, 30% on the outside. Conversely, the expectations voiced 'round the table for the market's '99 upside were strikingly muted, especially coming off an unprecedented fourth straight year of double-digit gains in the S&P. But while our panelists suspect that the year just begun won't prove another layup for indexers, to a man (and woman) they all see bountiful opportunities along the length and breadth of the list. In deals. Even in market timing. Just not in the mega-caps and Webmania numbers that supercharged 1998's advances. Long-time readers will notice a fresh face gracing the '99 Roundtable table. It belongs to Meryl Buchanan, one-half of New York City's Buchanan Parker Asset Management. Meryl's a card-carrying value investor and, along with partner Don Parker (a fellow alum of Mike Price's Mutual Shares organization), makes the investment calls for their 10-year-old and quite successful hedge fund, Emerald Partners. This first of three weekly installments of the Roundtable covers the panel's globe-spanning discussion of the economic, political and technological forces shaping the investment outlook. Also, the stock- and sundry other investment-picking turns of Roundtable members Barton Biggs and Mario Gabelli. The Street's top-ranked global strategist, Barton ran a hedge fund for eight years before joining Morgan Stanley, way back in 1973. A constant globetrotter, the founder and chairman of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Investment Management (assets under management, $167 billion) graciously took time to return to our panel before jetting off to Singapore Monday night. His message: that domestic investors could do worse, much worse, this year than the mid-single-digit total returns he expects on a bunch of REITs, or on Treasury TIPS. Farther afield, Barton's contrary streak leads him to expect a cross-section of Japanese shares to rise from the dead, and to recommend some more playable bounces elsewhere in Asia. But Barton's foreboding about the market is neatly summed up by his position on cash: Hold the maximum. He's worth listening to. A simple unweighted list of the positions Barton mentioned last January closed 1998 up only about 3% in the aggregate, hurt by painful shorts of General Electric and the NDX. But his major calls -- creeping deflation, higher Treasury prices, and Asia's rebound rallies -- worked nicely, indeed. Mario, the founder, guiding light and chairman of the Gabelli Funds, is "a true Ph.D. -- not as poor as 21 years ago, but still hungry and driven." Also irrepressible. Mario brought his usual spark and keen insights to our table -- as well as a bunch of tulips. Subtle, he's not. But effective, in the extreme. And focused like a laser on value, wherever it resides. Convinced that big-cap overvaluation leaves virtually no room on the upside in the averages, Mario nonetheless is finding loads of places -- as disparate as the telecoms, entertainment hotshots and the industrial uglies -- in which to put his clients' money to work. Mario is enamored of "deals, deals and more deals," and it's no secret why. The twists and turns of financial engineering not only allow him to stretch his considerable imagination, but all manner of deals have also been very good to Mario and his clients. A dozen of the 16 stocks he mentioned during last year's session closed 1998 up. The unweighted average gain of the entire group approached 40%, aided considerably by deal-powered moves in a bunch of media stocks. Enough build-up. The good stuff follows.