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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Marcellus who wrote (8111)	3/31/2000 12:53:00 AM
From: engineer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

No debate him on SUBSTANCE is the issue. I suppose you also believe that Bill Frezza had some real underlying technological reasons for the BS he spread for more than a year? Suggested reading...(and various threads around there...) Message 6891125

To: Mark Marcellus who wrote (8111)	3/31/2000 11:13:00 AM
From: Mark Marcellus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

I received a couple of PM's in response to my previous post, and this prompted to think a little more about what it was on the Tero issue that caused me to come out of lurk mode. What worries me is that the debate will sink from the current excellent level of discussion into a contest of personalities. IMO, any post which focuses on the personality or motivations of the poster, rather than on what is being said, increases the risk of that happening. In hopes that Ramsey won't consider it OT, I'd like to spell out my concerns a little more explicitly. Please bear with me while I indulge in a little personal history. I was an early investor in the "new" Iomega back in 1995. In fact, until Qualcomm came along, Iomega was my most profitable stock investment ever. I was an active participant on the Motley Fool's Iomega board. Iomega and Qualcomm are very different companies, and the sources and size of Qualcomm's future growth are larger than Iomega's by several orders of magnitude. However, the dynamics are very similar. In the case of Iomega, the company was growing very rapidly around late 1995. Those of us checking the channel and doing our research knew that the company had a blockbuster on its hands with the Zip drive. We also knew that they were protected for the immediate future both by their superior technical capabilities and by their IPR. There were, on the Iomega board and elsewhere, detractors who questioned the value of Iomega's IPR, their manufacturing capabilities, and the size of their future market. Some were expressing honest disagreements of opinion, others were shorts with an agenda who were trying to drive down the price of the stock. By late 1995 and early 1996, when Iomega was trying to put out a modestly priced secondary, the shorts actually had some success. They managed to get a story going on the Street, which was ultimately printed in Barron's, that Iomega was guilty of accounting irregularities. The secondary was cancelled, and the shorts "won". This proved to be a pyrrhic victory indeed. Despite the cancellation of the secondary, Iomega's stock price really didn't go down much. Furthermore, within a couple of months it became clear that there was no substance to the planted story, and that Iomega's sales and profits were very real. Iomega's stock soared, and they did a secondary for a huge amount of money. Many shorts lost millions, some lost their jobs. This time it looked like the longs had "won". As it turned out, the shorts did "win" on one level. The Iomega board, formerly an excellent forum for sharing knowledge on the company and a place where all opinions received a fair hearing, turned into a snake pit of mistrust and vituperation. Anyone who suggested doubts about some aspect of the company's business was accused of being a short with a hidden agenda. Posters who had long supported the company, and were now questioning some aspects of their current business, were hounded off the board. One anonymous poster showed up who claimed he was only there out of concern for individual investors who, he felt, were getting caught up in a speculative frenzy. Needless to say, this was greeted with suspicion and outright hostility. Many suspected that he was acting as a shill for a competing company. To be honest, I still don't know what his agenda was. What I do know is that his posts were always reasonable, his arguments were always sound, and much of what he wrote at the time has been borne out 100% by subsequent events. I must confess that I initially shared the hatred (there is no better word) that many "Iomegans" had for those who were short the stock. Much of this hatred was easily justified, because there were some sleazy tricks pulled by some of the shorts. Fortunately for myself, I had an epiphany some time in early 1996. (It helped that I was seeing the stock rise despite all the nasty stuff that was going down). I realized that Iomega would ultimately succeed or fail based on its own merits, and that hatred directed toward those on the other side of the debate was a negative emotion. Instead of seeing myself as engaging in a battle with others, I began to focus on searching for the truth. While I still made plenty of mistakes, this approach served me well as the rest of the Iomega story unfolded. In retrospect, it is clear to me that the winners on both sides of the Iomega debate were those who kept an open mind and considered all arguments based only their merits, and without regard to who was making the argument. Those who viewed the debate as a personal, dogmatic, or moral struggle ended up as losers. Indeed, some lost everything. The last time I checked (about 20,000 posts ago), the "Coming Into the Buy Range" thread seemed to me to be undergoing the same process of deterioration that I witnessed on the Iomega board. It is my fervent hope that the same thing doesn't happen here.