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

To: chaz who wrote (4266)	7/25/1999 2:56:00 AM
From: mariner	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 54805

Chaz Understand your reasoning regarding NTAP however I don't think it will be dead money. Certainly if playing the game purely by the rules, one is probably not invested here, however I think most of us like to keep positions outside the pure gorillas as long as they perform/hold promise. The true gorillas being awfully few and far between. I think Downsouth could probably address your concerns regarding the technology and market size better than me (actually I'm quite sure of that). However two things strike me as interesting. I think the Dell factor is only now coming into play. FWIW the big Dell newspaper adds are featuring the storage solutions more prominently now. I suspect Dell is looking to move in this area - can't be bad for NTAP. In addition, while EMC is certainly a lot bigger, I believe that NTAP's marketspace does in fact show quite a bit of promise. The last quarterly report was quite solid - seems to me it wouldn't be overly aggressive to hold and wait to see if the growth trend continues. I've not heard anything from management to indicate otherwise. Note, I don't think a comparison with IOMEGA is valid. They are a completely different company, with very much a retail one trick pony product line IMO. As far as what to hold as a single best idea for the next year, I'm sure we could do a survey on the thread (maybe we should) and come up with a host of good suggestions. I suspect QCOM would top the list. I don't necessarily think in this fashion. I don't see it as necessary to pick the number one stock each year in order to be successful. I think if one sticks with the tech/internet/bandwidth/connectivity demand theme however there are a host of great firms with potential royalty status (relatively few possible gorillas though). Personnally, my money is on QCOM, JDSU, PMCS (there's a few others worthy here also), CSCO (thinking of LU/NT) and WCOM, the latter purely a function of wanting to be in the service provider space, and a bet on superior management. (The stock has lagged this year also, so one of these days it will probably catch fire). Overall, I think QCOM remains extremely attractive going forward, although not without risk if the company does not execute as well as we all expect. I'm holding NTAP for now, and expect we will move to new highs once the market nervousness is over and the growth trend is confirmed as intact. mariner PS: A while back I brought up the subject of electronic bill presentment and payment as the possible next "killer app." I see Checkfree has gone through a decent correction of late. I'm wondering if anyone else has thoughts regarding EBPP generally and where they might be placing their bets. Suspect this could be a very exciting area over the next year - in fact we should see tremendous growth here going forward I think. Somebody must be planning to make some money on this somehow!

To: chaz who wrote (4266)	7/25/1999 10:15:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Then, Mike Buckley, some posts back, observed that with revenues 20% of EMC's, it (EMC) seemed a better buy long term. Chaz, I have no reason to disbelieve you so I must have written that. If I wrote that as little as two weeks ago, I'm a lot smarter two weeks later. :) For me, it's not that NTAP's revenue might be smaller. Honestly, at this very moment I don't have the slightest idea what NTAP's or EMC's revenue is. I'd have to look them up. So it's not the amount of revenue per se that is important. It's that the revenue is a symptom of the space they are operating in. EMC's revenue is a symptom of the amount of storage needs being created by EMC's customers. EMC deals with the big boys. I'm terrible at remembering numbers (don't even know EMC's revenue!) but I do remember the big picture -- that the overwhelming majority of storage needs are being created by the largest of the large corportations thoughout the world. Their storage needs are being created at huge rates of growth partly because it is the largest corporations that are fueling the kind of usage of the Internet that creates storage needs. It may not always be that way. An example is that the most growth of employment comes from the small companies. There may be a day when the storage needs are created by the gazillion medium and small companies. But not in the next 10 years as I see it. I'm not suggesting in the slightest way that NTAP isn't a great company or won't be a great investment. I simply didn't want to own both. I had to make a choice and it was that sort of thinking, right or wrong, that helped me make it. --Mike Buckley