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

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (40442)	3/15/2001 8:36:41 AM
From: saukriver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Intel indicated last week that their margins would be coming down. It will be interesting to see how that impacts AMD as any battle will impact the balance sheets of both. The question is which balance sheet will be able to absorb that kind of pressure in a slower growth, recession environment Actually, the question started out whether Intel is a gorilla. I said--as others have stated before--that the license to AMD it was forced to give is so broad that it has built in competition. That seems the hallmark of a non-gorilla. I keep suggesting that Intel is a strong king of PC chips. You have come back before with all that strong balance sheet stuff. I am not taking the bait on whether Intel's balance sheet is strong; it seems a fools argument to say that it is not. My point is simply, so what? Kings also have strong balance sheets. Balance sheets are not the factors one looks for to find gorillas. Nokia slashed their Q1 forecast today here in Europe and the market has responded by increasing Nokia's shares +12%. Here's to all of our companies slashing forecasts and the market responding with a positive 12% daily gain. ;-) As you well know Bruce, Europeans are nuts. However, this gives Intel a glimmer of hope. Facing built-in competition, slower growth, and a recession, Intel should just slash its estimates yet again to get the +12% pop in its shares that NOK enjoyed last night. saukriver

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (40442)	3/15/2001 4:23:45 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Web Guru Alberto Vilar Shrugs Off Tech Slump Thursday March 15 12:46 PM ET By Per Jebsen <<NEW YORK (Reuters) - Alberto Vilar, a cultured and outspoken advocate of Internet investing, is absolutely unfazed by the collapse in tech stocks. Yet there is a topic that bothers him. Trump. Donald Trump. The real estate mogul has won approval despite vigorous opposition by Vilar and other wealthy New Yorkers to complete an 861-foot-tall building, Trump World Tower, that fills up the view from Vilar's 30-bedroom New York City apartment near the United Nations (news - web sites). ``People hate that damn building. It's a monster. It's changed the skyline of New York,'' Vilar said. ``At least, I stood up and said no .... What has Mr. Trump given to the city?'' Mention tech stocks, though, and the Cuban-American fund manager and philanthropist perks up -- despite unpleasant recent events. Vilar's flagship Amerindo Technology D Fund (Nasdaq:ATCHX - news) has fallen a whopping 80 percent plus since last March. If you had entrusted him with $10,000 then, it would be worth about $2,000 today. Some of Vilar's predictions -- such as Yahoo! Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) possibly exceeding a $300 billion market value -- sound hollow with the Internet media company trading below $10 billion. Vilar remains a bull. ``I think you're going to see the biggest period in technology ... in the next five years,'' he said. Tech ``prices are as cheap as they are going to be'' following the 60-percent plunge in the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite Index (^IXIC - news). Vilar may have cost investors a bundle of money in the past year, but his shellacking hasn't damped his charitable giving. He donated $50 million last month to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts to host Russian opera and train arts managers. Last week, he showed up at Columbia University with opera star Cecilia Bartoli and pledged $10 million for neurological scholarships and research. Vilar, 60, can afford to be an optimist -- and a major donor -- because of his striking past success. The concentrated Tech D fund zoomed 249 percent in 1999, almost triple the giddy ascent that year of the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite Index. Investors who lost money with him after this run-up should stay the course, Vilar counsels. His take on it: Volatility comes with the territory. Even including 2000, tech's annus horribilis, Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc., which Vilar founded in 1980, claims to have produced annualized returns over 10 years of 24 percent, compared with 17 percent for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (^SPX - news). New York-based Amerindo manages $4.5 billion in assets and the Tech D fund has $115 million. Now is time to buy tech stocks again, Vilar says. But not just any tech stocks. Not the usual suspects like Dell Computer Corp. (NasdaqNM:DELL - news), Cisco Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:CSCO - news), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) or AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news). These companies are yesterday's stories and are growing slowly, Vilar believes. Instead, the future resides with the very newest Internet and telecommunications companies. Vilar lists Ariba Inc. (NasdaqNM:ARBA - news), Commerce One Inc. (NasdaqNM:CMRC - news), Corvis Corp. (NasdaqNM:CORV - news), Exodus Communications Inc. (NasdaqNM:EXDS - news), FreeMarkets Inc. (NasdaqNM:FMKT - news), i2 Technologies Inc. (NasdaqNM:ITWO - news), ONI Systems Corp. (NasdaqNM:ONIS - news), Siebel Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SEBL - news), and Sycamore Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:SCMR - news). ``Technology is not monolithic. Everybody believes it is monolithic. The truth is you have two techs in the world,'' Vilar said. Old tech is companies built on second generation, client-server computing technology, the generation that followed mainframes, Vilar says. Big, established telephone companies also fall into this doomed category. New tech companies, the third computer generation, rely on ''100 percent Internet technology.'' These companies will enable the coming boom in business-to-business electronic commerce. Such commerce, Vilar believes, will rest on a stool with three legs: business-to-business electronic software, Internet infrastructure, and high-speed, optical networking. New tech companies' stock prices are ``probably at historic lows right now,'' he said. ``They're going to produce this infrastructure, to where ... 50 percent of all business is going to move.'' Vilar, a man who places high-risk bets on Net stocks, loves the classical performing arts, especially opera. He favors Richard Wagner's Lohengrin, Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, and Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata. ``I'm attracted to opera for two reasons: for the voices and for the classical music,'' Vilar said. ``You have drama, you have stories, you have acting, and you have dancing.'' Vilar graduated in 1962 from Washington & Jefferson College and received an MBA in 1969 from Iona College. He served two years as a commissioned officer. The U.S. Army changed his life for the better because it gave him excellent management experience and introduced him to Europe, said Vilar. Last year, Austria awarded him its Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts for philanthropy that has included gifts to the Vienna State Opera. Serendipity has marked his career, Vilar believes. ``I went to Wall Street by accident, the accident was the Cuban Revolution, I got lucky, and I worked for two companies that had an interest in emerging growth stocks,'' he said. ``Then I got super lucky, and I discovered technology.''>>

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (40442)	3/16/2001 9:33:23 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

mostly OT re WCOM, AMAT, and INTC: It certainly does look like the telecom sector is (finally) bottoming. As I see it, there is no chance for the likes of CSCO to bottom, until the telcos have finished their self-destruction. I think there is a lot of air in JNPR, and less in CSCO. But I wouldn't touch either (long, that is), until most of the CLECs have been gobbled up by whoever survives, (or allowed to starve to death). This process is well along, but not finished. How long will it be before the industry finishes writing off all their Iridiums? AMAT and the other semi-equips also have been in a horizontal chart pattern for months. I've been successfully trading the 40-50 range on AMAT, and the 30-36 range on TXN. Made back about 20% so far, of what I lost being LTB&H in 2000. And I was out of the market for 7 months of 2000. Ugghhh. I still think the semi-equips are in denial, just hoping for that sharp V-shaped 1998-style downturn. Looking over the valley, not realizing how wide the valley is. When the market realizes the current downturn is going to be more like 1973 than 1998 or 1990, the semi-equips will find a new, lower range. This isn't just an inventory problem, or an overcapacity problem in a few sectors. Overall consumer spending is just starting to follow consumer sentiment downward. We haven't seen the bottom for capital spending yet. Consumer demand is going to go down, and stay down for a year. The Shrub is thinking about raising tariffs on steel, to protect U.S. workers. We tried that in 1932, and it didn't work out well. The rest of E.Asia is going to follow Japan into recession, and they won't be able to export their way out of trouble, this time. Lots of opportunity for "exogenous shocks" to the market. I will not be buying back Intel. They are becoming a big conglomerate, with a finger in every chip pie. Still very efficient, but I don't see them ever regaining the stature they had when chips mainly went into PCs, and everyone replaced their PC every 2 years, because they needed the latest Intel CPU. Anyway, I have a list of Gorillas and other industry leaders I want to buy sometime. NTAP, EMC, CSCO, AMAT, TXN, others. I read the Gorilla Game a year ago, and I've been very, very slowly moving my portfolio in that direction. But I want to see the stocks go down, and then go flat for months, before I buy. And I want to see the SI threads for those stocks go silent, with only one post a week, and those by shorters and short-term traders. By the time Gorilla Investing is as out-of-favor as Value Investing was in 1999, then, and only then, will my portfolio be mostly Gorillas.