Will this apply to ANCR???
How To Prettify A Portfolio: Buy Some Winners
(12/10/99, 9:22 a.m. ET)
By Russell Wayne , TechWeb
A narrow segment of the market has done well this year, but most stocks have not. To counter this, some professional portfolio managers may be adding a handful of the best-performing stocks to make sure their list of year-end holdings looks good even if their returns have been disappointing. Savvy investors need to be aware of this.
This has been a year of widely divergent stock performances. The best of all returns have been turned in by the relatively short list of household names in technology and communications. Last winter, the big three cybercompanies -- Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo -- rocketed from the starting line. More recently, the action has shifted to the big names in cellular, such as Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Qualcomm. Aside from these and companies in related businesses, it's been a boring and unprofitable period.
Even on days when the indexes have moved sharply higher, market breadth has been weak. Despite the apparent rebound of the past 60 days, the ratio of advances to declines has deteriorated. Prior to the upswing, things were even worse. So when the year's results are finally tallied three weeks from now, most numbers aren't going to look good.
Way back when, a sage investor said if you're not doing well, you should dazzle them with your footwork. Portfolio managers wanting to follow this advice are probably in the process of reshuffling their portfolios even as we speak. This far along in the year, particularly if you are a value- or small-cap manager (whose returns are almost certainly horrid), it may seem worthwhile to pick up some Qualcomm, Yahoo, or Motorola, hoping investors will think you've been aboard all year long.
This may sound absurd (and requires a major style shift), but window dressing has been around for quite a while and will most assuredly be the guiding force behind a number of changes taking place prior to year-end. Those who look closely at fund reports may want to pay particular attention to the cost and market values of the holdings, which should provide a clue to the timing.
None of this has anything to do with proper stock selection, which relates primarily to the upward momentum of earnings and resulting reflection in stock prices. In some years, the relationship is strong. In others, such as 1999, the link is weak. What appears as increasing weakness, however, may be a function of supply and demand. We have heard, but cannot substantiate, the thesis that investable assets are increasing far more rapidly than the available supply of investment vehicles.
If that thought is correct, it would go far toward explaining why some valuations have gone to extremes. It would also suggest why we may see more of the same going forward.
Between year-end window dressing and a mismatch in supply and demand, there's reason to expect the recent winners still have some room to advance, even if multiples are in excess of 100 times earnings. We may well need to be brave in the new world of 2000 and beyond.
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ANother take on ANCR/INTC..........
zdnet.com
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Intel invests again to promote new I/O architecture
By Sonia R. Lelii, PC Week Online
December 7, 1999 5:49 PM ET
Intel Corp. plans to invest nearly $15 million in Ancor Communications Inc. to develop switches that support the next-generation InfiniBand I/O architecture.
It's the latest round of financing that Intel has made to promote the new I/O interconnect standard. Several months ago, the Santa Clara, Calif., company invested some $6 million in Crossroads Systems Inc. of Austin, Texas, which makes routers.
Today's announcement comes just weeks before the first draft of the InfiniBand architecture is expected for public release. Ancor, of Eden Prairie, Minn., is expected to bring InfiniBand switches to market by 2001.
Industry observers say the InfiniBand spec is moving forward at a steady pace, despite the rocky start that surrounded the new architecture almost a year ago. At the time, Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM split from Intel Corp. on how to move toward a new switched-fabric interconnect. The two groups reconciled last summer, and since then the InfiniBand Trade Association has been working to merge what had been two sets of I/O specifications.
Merging the specs
Compaq., IBM, Dell Computer Corp. and HP are expected to release products supporting InfiniBand around 2001 and 2002. Some observers have expressed concern, though, that merging the specs would not be seamless since the two camps were developing standards based on different approaches.
Ancor officials say divergence shouldn't be a problem in building products because the first draft of InfiniBand will contain enough fundamentals for the new I/O design.
"We pretty much know the basic design," said Rob Davis, Ancor's vice president of advanced product planning. "But there is always a lot of tweaking that goes on [in the beginning] as people find errors in logic."
According to Bob Livolsi, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Crossroads, the two camps hadn't done all that much in developing separate standards.
"The specifications were there but the work on the products had not gone that far," said Livolsi. "We were looking at both specs very hard. We knew we had to stay in both camps, so the compromise was great for us."
COme'on ANCR Shift the SAN, take the BAND!!
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In the first quarter, IBM will also unveil details about its chip set, code-named Summit, for Intel Corp.'s forthcoming IA-64 processors.
IBM set out to develop Summit "because we cannot find available chip sets with the reliable performance and high availability" needed for 64-bit computing, said Tom Bradicich, program director, Netfinity Architecture, in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Summit will support multiprocessing, clustering, PCI-X, remote I/O and InfiniBand, as well as memory mirroring, hot-swap memory and an advanced cache architecture, said Bradicich. He expects initial Summit-based systems to be available in late 2001. Intel's first 64-bit chip, Itanium, is due in the middle of next year.
The specification for InfiniBand, which is the merger of the Future I/O and NGIO specs, is expected in January. Bradicich said he anticipates prototype products in early 2001 and commercial products following in the second or third quarter.
zdnet.com
It's the future of the future, stupid
techweb.com
/O Camps Unite Under InfiniBand
Marcia Savage
San Francisco - The two groups of industry heavyweights that battled for months over a new I/O specification for next-generation servers came together last week to kick off their recently unified effort.
Previously called System I/O when the two camps disclosed their compromise Aug. 31, the organization now is dubbed the InfiniBand Trade Association. The group is led by Intel Corp. and IBM Corp., among others, and added eight new sponsoring members at an industry event held here.
"I'm here to confirm rumors of a standards merger," said Tom Bradicich, director of architecture and design for IBM's Netfinity servers and co-chair of the association's steering committee.
The merger brings together two organizations that previously argued over whether the new I/O standard should be Next Generation I/O (NGIO) or Future I/O (FIO). Intel, Dell Computer Corp., NEC Corp. and others had pushed NGIO, while IBM, Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others were behind FIO.
"After 10 months of negotiations, I'm happy to shake his hand at this public forum," Bradicich said as he introduced Tom MacDonald, general manager of the fabric component division at Intel's enterprise server group, and steering committee co-chair.
The goal of InfiniBand is to develop an I/O specification that boosts data transfer by using a channel-based, switched fabric architecture. A draft specification is due by year's end, with a final release scheduled for early 2000. The first products based on the specification are scheduled for production in 2001.
Seven companies are on the association's steering committee: IBM, Intel, Compaq, Dell, HP, Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. New sponsoring members include 3Com Corp., Adaptec Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks Corp.
The InfiniBand specification combines the best of both the NGIO and FIO specifications and also creates some new aspects, MacDonald said. "The real winner here is the end user, who doesn't have to worry about buying into the wrong technology," he said. "There will be one common technical target for you."
The nonprofit InfiniBand group does not own or license any intellectual property, said Balint Fleischer, director of architecture at Sun. Rather, companies using another vendor's architecture will enter into a licensing agreement with the vendor that provided the technology.
Intellectual property rights were a sticking point between the former I/O groups, sources said. The FIO camp also had stressed the need to provide room in the specification for differentiation. "We've set up a business model to enable innovation and differentiation," MacDonald said.
The InfiniBand group will create a scalable and reliable specification to meet the growing demands of the Internet, he said.
"Data is the oil of the 21st century," Bradicich said. The new I/O standard "will serve to lubricate that data transfer and data process," he added.
The new interconnect will come in one-, four- and 12-wire versions, with throughput ranging from 500 Mbytes per second to 6 Gbytes per second, and will support both copper and fiber implementations.
"What we have is truly the next step in computer architecture," said Martin Whittaker, HP's research and development manager, enterprise systems and software group.
BrCD didn't want to play in the Infiniband> Right. "come play in our BAND"
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