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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saulamanca who wrote (73477)	3/28/2001 7:57:52 PM
From: Saulamanca	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

No Wall Street analyst saved professional investors more money in 2000 than Ravi Suria, the convertible bond strategist who just left Lehman Brothers to join Stan Druckenmiller at Duquesne Capital Management. Druckenmiller is one of the top hedge fund managers of the past 20 years. Suria presciently nailed the unwinding of the telecom services industry, as well as the stock market disaster known as Amazon.com (AMZN:Nasdaq - news). People who listened to him either got out of those stocks or shorted them. While his work on Amazon.com has gotten more publicity because of the popularity of the Web site, Suria's analysis of the telecom services sector may stand as his most important contribution; after all, Amazon's peak market capitalization was $39 billion, which is dwarfed by the peak $640 billion market cap of the telecom services industry. (Amazon is now valued at about $4 billion and the telcos at about $220 billion.) Suria is a brainy analyst with a penchant for hardheaded, fundamental research. He actually knows his way around a balance sheet and pays attention to a company's credit structure. Unlike other analysts with higher profiles, Suria worries about the downside to investors -- he can connect the financial dots. For example, seeing credit spreads for the telecommunications services companies widen dramatically in the first quarter of 2000, Suria dug into their balance sheets. He found the soft underbelly of the tech boom -- the vast, debt-financed overcapitalization of untested companies swimming in uncharted waters. He wrote a devastating report on the sector in November. By late last year, he was making by-appointment-only presentations to Lehman's top institutional clients -- including many of the top hedge funds -- about his findings and their investment implications. Suria sat down withTSC Chief Markets Writer Brett D. Fromson and updated his views on the debt binge of the 1990s and the future of telecom service companies, telecom equipment companies, the overall economy, the IPO market and, oh, yes, Amazon. thestreet.com