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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (55055)	11/3/2001 3:33:49 PM
From: John Trader	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Jacob, I wonder how much of your decisions are based on your excellent understanding of fundamentals - a "numbers" approach if you will, and how much is based on "gut feel", intuition, technical analysis, or other means. This is an interesting question. I have always have thought that the numbers side is of less importance than the other components. One argument for this is that the calculation of future earnings are always guess-work for tech stocks, depending on how close to the "edge" the company is. For example it is easier to estimate future earnings for IBM than it is for a company like NTAP. There are other, factors of course, for example the current recession and war on terrorism. If the numbers approach, which is more straight forward and more easily adopted, was the primary component of success, then most would adopt this, and it would no longer work. Also, as pointed out in today's Barrons, timing is a biggy, which has more to do with intuition I think than numbers. An example of too much emphasis on the numbers approach may be Bill F., who recently posted here. My impression is that he holds firm to his idea of what prices should be without factoring in many other drivers. Whatever your approach is, you seem to be doing it extremely well. An example is the caution going into the month of September, and your bullish call in late September. One other question: Why do you think Cisco will do to JNPR what they did to Bay Networks (refering to a recent post)? I just want to understand your reasoning (I currently hold JNPR). I also wonder in general how you go about selecting your stocks - it seems you go mostly with tech blue chips, which certainly has a lot of merit. However, during a recovery phase smaller caps stocks tend to outperform (but going into and in the middle of a bear market they underperform). Thanks, John