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Technology Stocks : John, Mike & Tom's Wild World of Stocks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wlheatmoon who wrote (228)	12/27/1999 7:46:00 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2850

Well, as they would say on the myth thread....got poots? I bought back into QCOM last Thursday, wtf, might as well join the party (and yes, I still have my QCOM poots...just in case.

To: wlheatmoon who wrote (228)	2/1/2000 11:41:00 AM
From: John Pitera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2850

I agree with Cramer on AOL, so that and Dis are what I will be looking to add to the pot. Little Room for Error By James J. Cramer 2/1/00 7:11 AM ET Click here for the latest from James J. Cramer. Every day, I have to rethink my role as a columnist writing about the market. Every day. Because the market has become a vicious beast that allows for very few mistakes. Let me give you the perfect for-instance. I get hard copies of papers delivered to me from around the world to look at different business sections. (I scan the online editions, but I find that a lot of stuff doesn't make it into the online editions.) Join the discussion on TSC Message Boards. Yesterday I got a Boston Globe from Friday. In it was a glowing article about Sapient (SAPE:Nasdaq - news) written by two very respectable business columnists. The article talked about how well Sapient had weathered the new dot-com world. If you had gotten this article, you probably would have bought the stock immediately, even though that was not the intention of the authors. The same day, Sapient reported a bad number. The exact same day. The stock went down 40 points. We can conclude: a--The writers got fooled and are idiots. b--The Sapient guys got fooled and in turn fooled the writers. c--This market is nuts because Sapient just wasn't that bad. d--The business market is so dynamic that you can't take a snapshot of it anymore and have it be more than just a true picture for that second in time. I am going with C and D. I am not long or short Sapient, but it is pretty frightening to be "wrong" for 40 points before the ink is dry on the paper. The market just gets it wrong so often these days because the conditions are changing on a dime. That's where we are right now in the stock market. The margin for error is too great, and the need to equivocate is growing, not shrinking. You can't be right for more than 10 minutes! Take our TV show last Friday night. Given that Qualcomm (QCOM:Nasdaq - news) had just reported, I didn't think it was possible that they could have material market information about deals with China that they would not mention on the conference call. That made me not want to own the stock. But this weekend, they revealed an important marketing initiative that turned the stock around. Again, I ask, was I fooled, management fooled, the market fooled, or do things just change so fast now that nothing holds up for more than a few days or even hours? I think it is the latter. You want to talk about ephemeral? Let's look at this America Online (AOL:NYSE - news) decision to merge with Time Warner (TWX:NYSE - news). If AOL is to survive and prosper long term in a world where television is still king of the home -- and it is, by the way, and those of us who get their news online, while growing, are still in the vast minority -- it needs to have a broadcast and a broadband strategy. Yet by doing the logical thing it needed to do to survive, it, short term, killed its own stock. Anyone who championed this deal, including yours truly, is now judged to have made a foolish mistake. And in the world that I helped create, a world where you are at last held accountable for your financial mistakes, that's how it should be. The smart/right thing to have done with AOL was to short the *(&^% out of the stock the moment this deal was announced. Nevertheless, everyone I know in the dot-com world nods silently that this deal is the killer for everybody else involved in the space. It is pretty much game over for everybody else involved because it boxes everybody out. It may have made the owners of AOL look foolish, but it makes the owners of everything else even more foolish. Indeed, the sector still hasn't recovered from this merger. What I am adapting to, both in this column and in my stock picking, is a reality where the penalty for being wrong is unbelievably high. But the need to make fast judgments is so great that you have to risk being wrong if you are going to make big money. The answer, again for the moment, may be in trying to find the stocks where the risk/reward is not 40 points up or down, as is the case with Sapient or AOL, and is instead 10 points up and 3 points down. That way, instead of being a fool, you can be smart and yet have made a foolish mistake. That's a big difference.