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

To: DaYooper who wrote (42218)	4/28/2001 11:37:36 AM
From: straight life	Respond to of 54805

stock market sucks; instead, a heart-felt recommendation of the sublime: lakotawolf.com

To: DaYooper who wrote (42218)	4/28/2001 11:46:50 AM
From: Judith Williams	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

We've all been humbled and are not feeling too talkative. If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed—there’s hope for our portfolios if we can just manage to survive a couple of more decades. Kurzweil always twists one’s synapses, and he’s done it again in The Singularity Is Near. The book is not yet available (at least on Amazon), but from the precis it will soon be an addition to the “must reads” for carpetologists especially as he includes some nifty charts to illustrate his major points. kurzweilai.net Kurzweil takes us “back to the future,” and claims it’s widely misunderstood. And the reasons behind this claim shed some light on network effects. What we have been calling “network effects” may, in fact, if Kurzweil is right, be simply a characteristic of how complex systems change. Kurzweil contends that exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process. He puts technology in that category and includes an interesting discussion of the “S” curve adoption cycle. Technology, he believes, is a self-organizing system. Imbedded information with feedback loops leads to exponential increases as effectiveness begets greater effectiveness at an increasing pace until displacement produces another path to increased effectiveness. His chart on mass use of inventions is mind boggling, albeit he starts with the technologically challenged Cro-Magnum man. Early in the cycle—when our furry ancestors were playing with fire and tinkering with iron—there were few clues about the explosive growth as the changes were modest enough within a short time frame to mask the exponential territory ahead. And most important, Kurzweil finds, even if we had a glimpse of the exponential time ahead, we wouldn’t like it and would argue our way out of it. “Although technological growth is in the exponential world, we humans live in a linear realm.” It’s easy to call the 1990s a bubble: It sure looks that way extrapolating from past performance, but predictions based on today’s rate of progress—i.e., linearly—will always fall short. (Here he cites the Fed and other economists who are so fond of linear comparisons. These hold up over short time periods, but fall apart when a longer frame is used for measurement.) We’re doubling the rate of progress every decade. At this accelerating rate, we’ll realize a century of progress—at today’s rate—in only 25 calendar years. What may have greater implications for G&Ks than his overarching views are the places where he sees exponential growth taking place: computational power, miniaturization, etc. --Judith Williams

To: DaYooper who wrote (42218)	4/28/2001 8:58:40 PM
From: Larry Grzemkowski	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

DaYooper "1. We've all been humbled and are not feeling too talkative." That is the right answer but why? I believe because there was not enough discussion about valuation and what is the right price to buy. I know many of you bought early and at a much better price than most especially those that bought late in 1999. Mike did caution from time to time on valuation and I am sure there were some others. No one likes to talk about their mistakes and if you don’t think ridding NTAP from 140 to 15 is a mistake then there is little hope for those with that mentality. NTAP is about the only G & K I did buy right and it made up for losses in other stocks. I just bought some SEBL “Right” around 33. I can remember saying if SEBL ever gets back down to 70 I’ll buy it. Well it was overvalued at 70 and I am glad I did not have the cash at 70 because I bought it at a good valuation at 33. Even though some did mention valuation there was not any really hard serious discussion. About the only time there was any serious discussion was when some outsider came on the thread to tell us how stupid we were to be paying those prices and we got rid of them. TekBoy, don’t even go there because I know you will go back and dig up all the old posts that did discuss valuation. And even though there were some most folks did not heed the cautionary advice. I believe there needs to be more emphasis on valuation on this thread. And I am not complaining because I make my own decisions about what I buy. It’s my fault I did not buy at a fair valuation in most cases. But I won’t make the same mistake again. Enough from a Lurker! Oh by the way the good news is that most on my stocks are at fair value now :o). You all now the bad news. Larry G