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

To: lurqer who wrote (40268)	3/12/2001 10:50:20 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 54805

Suspect that one could make a case for IMB in the '70s being more a case of Innovator's Dilemma wrt DEC. Yes. That and a few other thoughts. This bear market in the Nasdaq tops the one in the 70's. Anybody have any cash left to print up some T-Shirts to mark the historical occasion? I take an XL.... We could also talk about some of the failed execution moves and foresight by management during some key transitional reflection points that could have changed history. Maybe it helps that Chambers spent 8 years at Wang and 6 years at IBM. Maybe not. Regardless, Silverbacks today like Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle would need to be viewed in terms of cash position, ability to scale down, cut costs and survive a downturn when comparing to IBM. We know Intel was founded in 1968 which means it has been around for over three decades and is the 'oldest' of the Silverbacks. Microsoft was founded in 1975. Oracle was founded in 1977. Cisco was founded in 1984. At least the companies and their managements have been around through various types of economic environments and are not 'unfamiliar' with the economic cycle. As an example, in spite of Intel's cyclical warnings (which they and the semiconductor industry have been through a few times), they maintained that their investment in capital spending remains in tact with the strategy that coming out of this slow down will have Intel positioned as a stronger company. We could go through the Silverback group and make comments on the management teams and their strategies for utilizing their cash hordes and strategy to be positioned well coming out of any cyclical decline. We can also toss in the large companies such as Sun Microsystems, EMC and Applied Materials who have also weathered previous economic 'storms'. If we look at some of the younger companies like Siebel, i2, Brocade, Network Appliance, Juniper, Checkpoint, etc... - some of the management's and their companies have been around enough years to have seen cyclical technology slow downs. If not with their current companies, with those they worked with in previous positions. We saw the announcement last week of i2 having purchased a company they were interested in acquiring for a little over $100 Million. When they were first looking, the price was $1 Billion. We may see a lot of consolidation and companies that have the stock currency or the cash to make some acquisitions because the price is now approaching 'right' and the strategy might be the proverbial 'the strong get stronger....'. Plenty of discussion on Nasdaq targets, bearish trends, secular bear markets, gloom and doom headlines to foster sentiment that is a mirror image of one year ago. Let's just print up our G&K T-Shirts to mark the historical occasion of the worst Nasdaq bear market in history so we can get on with it (life, that is). How about a picture of a bear popping bubbles with his claws that have the ticker symbols of all of our favorites in each bubble? BB