Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (38315)	10/16/2000 10:26:20 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Brian, You may be completely right about Biggs' personality. I've never met him and cannot tell. I used to work at Morgan Stanley where Biggs is the chief strategist. As such I had access to all in house publications (many of which were internal only). I've read many of his papers and sort of know how his mind works. I first liked him because he made several unpopular calls in late '97 through late '98. At every stage he predicted the inflection points of US and Asian markets correctly. Later during the Asian and Russian fiascos again he made several good calls. Regardless of the outcome, I was impressed that he was willing to make the unpopular predictions. Most top Wall Street crowd just swim with the flow. That his calls came out true shows that he knows what he is talking about as much any. As you have pointed out he does not know zip about technology, or most industries for that matter. You're talking about a man who's been around so long, he's seen the infancy (and sometimes demise) of many hot industries. He is not a stock picker. What he does know is how to look at the flow of capital around the world and do a relative comparison to see where the best buys are. The other thing is that understanding what most of these guys say is like trying to make sense of Greenspan. They each have theirown cryptic ways. For example, when Warren Buffette said his favorite stock is one that he'll never sell, some concluded that he was talking about the merits of long term buy and hold. But Mr. B. is value investor so what he was saying was that he likes companies with managements who create value well in excess of the stock appreciation. Therefore the stock will always remain undervalued and he'll never want to sell it. When Jimmy Rogers in '98 kept saying "nearly everyone who's bought bonds over tha past year has lost money", many people said nonesense because the bonds had swang widely several times. So they reasoned that losers and winners must have been about even. But Jimmy's background is that of a future hedge fund manager. And what he was saying was that though the bonds had swang several times, the futures had spent very little time in the peaks and long times sliding into the troughs. So unless you were one of the few who sold at the tops, you were losing money. In case of Biggs, I've seen him sound very bearish, and then just twick his asset allocation by only 3%. Without knowing where these guys come from, it is hard to interpret what they are saying. BTW, Peter Lynch made a similar observation about interpreting the CEOs of high tech and old economy companies (see One Up on Wall Street). regards and sorry for the long post, ST