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

To: surpow who wrote (11470)	11/30/1999 7:31:00 AM
From: Len	Respond to of 54805

Noah, I cannot give you any answers but I can tell you I sharew your concerns and doubt. When times get tough and my confidence wanes I look for one of the Q seers to come through. Len

To: surpow who wrote (11470)	11/30/1999 9:59:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Surpow, Your concerns about making investments in companies such as Qualcomm are valid. The issues are sometimes complex. As much as I value the importance of understanding a company inside and out, I think that by the time a carpetologist accomplished that feat the tornado would be over. It's the big picture stuff about gorilla gaming that makes it possible for an investor who doesn't know the intracacies of technology to make valid investments, so always remember to focus on the big stuff as you appear to be trying to do. One concern that I have is that there is an overestimate for the future market of high-speed data transmission. Anything is possible, but I would bet on the estimates proving to be understated ten years from now. Our society has a history of using computers to generate more and more data. Though you're right that anything can go wrong, probably the area of my least concern would be the amount of data being slung around the world in coming decades. will people really demand such a product in such numbers, and if not, couldn't that be catastrophic to Q, especially at these levels? Part of the reason for my optimism is that should the numbers prove to be not as demanding as I think will occur, there is still huge opportunity for growth. I know I've probably bored people with this, but my excitement for Qualcomm is that any person on the planet who is at least 8 years old is a potential Qualcomm customer. I also fall prey to posts that question whether or not CSCO's announcement of a new wireless product will slam HDR to an early grave. If Qualcomm depended upon HDR to be successful, I'd be concerned that Cisco or anyone could come out with a competing product. Whereas HDR can open up avenues of business that support CDMA, my understanding is that HDR is mostly an interim technology that will be eventually usurped by third-generation CDMA. Posts referring to a proposed non-profit organization to basically monitor patent rights, ... My opinion is that any time a non-profit organization is suggested to monitor patent right, that is evidence of the lock a company has on the patents. The non-profit organization has absolutely no control over the owner of the patents and is at best a weak coalition of like-minded folks who wish they owned the patents. and the thread's reaction to such posts also concern me. If you're looking for a uniform reaction on a thread, it will rarely if ever happen. And thank goodness! Eventually only you can decide what the likely outcome of a particular situation will be. Did you / do you go through similar feelings? Aboslutely! I'm probably wearing out the joke about being a carpetologist but my lack of technical understanding is at the very core of ambivalence I might have about any of my investments. I address it by diversifying my portfolio. If it helps you to grasp onto something, the most important thing I have learned in the last five years is that asking the kind of questions you are asking will guide you into enough enormously successful investments over time that the embarassingly huge mistakes will seem minor. In the last five years my portfolio has given me a 45% average annual return. In roughly the same period the success of the Motley Fool's Rule Breaker portfolio has made mine look like its managed by a rank amateur. Yet both portfolios are riddled with huge mistakes. Hope this helps. Hope others will comment. --Mike Buckley