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To: Frank Pembleton who wrote (92662)	7/22/2001 8:13:45 AM
From: Frank Pembleton	Respond to of 95453

Best Bets: Value manager keen on tech stocks By SHIRLEY WON From Friday's Globe and Mail It's a good time for "patient investors" to start nibbling away at some of the depressed tech stocks, says fund manager Duncan Stewart. "Technology is going to come back — certainly in the case of Nortel and Cisco — and is starting to come back in term of companies like ATI and Microsoft," says the partner in Toronto-based Tera Capital Corp. globeandmail.com --------------------------------------- Bait and Switch By Don Luskin Microsoft Announces Record Revenue For Fiscal Year 2001 Windows 2000 Professional, .NET Enterprise Servers Post Record Fourth-Quarter Revenue Performance Yep, reading through the first page of the press release, it was all just hunky dory. Earnings beat by a penny (after ignoring that icky investment write-off, of course), and revenues came in at the very high end of the higher range preannounced a week earlier. And, according to the glowing write-up, all Microsoft's corporate initiatives have been performing brilliantly. What's not to love? These guys just can't do anything wrong! This stock's going to be up ten points tomorrow, and the whole market will go with it. All that -- everything I've described so far -- was the bait. The switch came on page two of the press release. After all the bragging and all the hype, inserted innocently under the "Business Outlook" section, was the revelation --offered with utterly no explanation -- that the upcoming quarter was going to be a disaster -- an EPS miss of six cents below the Street's expectations, and lower than expected revenues, too. And P.S. -- your cat is dead. community.metamarkets.com

To: Frank Pembleton who wrote (92662)	7/22/2001 10:39:39 AM
From: isopatch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

And hold onto some cash too<g> Good article Frank, here's another good one. It does a good job of explaining why I'm not playing the tech stocks. Isopatch "On Friday, July 13th, Investors Business Daily compared the likes of Yahoo!, Microsoft and General Electric to aging rocks stars, the Rolling Stones to be exact… We are now a year and a quarter away from the peak in the NASDAQ and down near 60% on average. Many of the stocks that lead into that peak have collapsed completely--down 100%. Many others are waiting for the knackers to haul them off. Yet, interest still remains strong in these aging super stars. That's a shame, because the record is quite clear--investing in post-bubble assets rarely pays. The typical recovery times are measured in years and range into decades. Worse yet, many never make it, while others so totally reorganize themselves as to be unrecognizable and still others are forcibly reorganized. The bottom line is that after a bubble bursts it is best to look elsewhere for investment opportunities. The investor should be primarily interested in tomorrow's stars, or at worst today's, never yesterday's. In the early 1980s I first heard of the "vulture funds", investing partnerships, mutual funds, etc. that foraged amongst Wall Street's trash for opportunity. Interestingly enough that was a market that provided many such opportunities; the rubbish bins were full in 1982 and '83-'84 produced a tech wreck that created a ton of vulture candidates. Yet, few if any of those funds turned in handsome returns despite ample grist for their mills. There are many, many ways to make money in the markets, perhaps almost as many ways as there are participants, so it seems a shame to handicap yourself by foraging in the rubbish heap when the odds are against success. Yes, there are many fine companies in the trash today, but that is always the case. Remember we are not looking for fine companies; we are looking for fine stocks. You can own a fine company for years without making a cent, but a fine stock pays today. John Bollinger, CFA, CMT 13 July 2001"