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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (52887)	10/29/2002 9:03:18 AM
From: nick chacos	Respond to of 54805

08:40 ET Qualcomm: China to introduce competing CDMA technology? (QCOM) 35.46: AmTech Research says that Chinese officials along with two top telecom service providers will announce their own version of CDMA on Wednesday; says the technology is called TD-SCDMA and that the officials will call for an industrial alliance to promote this alternative to QCOM's WCDMA and CDMA2000; AmTech believes that China will try to pay little or no royalties

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (52887)	10/29/2002 11:34:51 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

There was lots of discussion about that in the conference call, noted below. Did you forget to include comments on this discussion? I did manage to read the report and while it is hardly a positive one, I do have to say that the standards adhered to by analyst reports sure make a scientist wince. CRM, even more that some other kinds of software, requires a lot of competent configuration and fitting to the business process to work at its best and it seems clear that not every Siebel customer gets that, but it seems to me that the fault lies more with Siebel's consulting partners (painful personal experience) or with unrealistic expectations on the part of customer management. Apparently 27% of an IT budget is spent on integrating applications. Market evaluations of EAI specifically show that currently only 1% of the total expenditure is on software ... all the rest is custom labor. There is huge potential for tools here, although most of the tools addressing this space, except for the ones specific to a given software package, seem to be not going anywhere much. They sell, but they don't take over the world as one would expect. I think the barrier here is partly technical, but also partly cultural. The one time Forte Fusion, now Sun's iIS, was an incredibly good technical solution and is a money maker, but it sure isn't taking over the world. One of the significant enhancements in 7.5 is a plug-in for I.E. which is supposed to dramatically improve client performance. This could be a lot more significant than such a simple thing seems since there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with the client performance of the 7.0 browser client, despite the huge advantage of a zero footprint install.

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (52887)	10/29/2002 5:34:20 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

THE FRONT OFFICE GORILLA GAME: Q3, 2002 -- PART 2 The Gorilla Game When I reported the numbers to you roughly three months ago, our Gorilla Game was performing very badly but it was at least slightly outperforming the S&P500 and the Naz. What a horrible difference a few months make! Since then, our Game has lost almost one-fourth of its value and it's now dramatically underperforming both indexes. I was wondering if the Game's current losses (roughly 40%) since inception are comparable to the losses that were rung up almost immediately after I started playing the game. Indeed, the last time the Game was performing as badly as it has recently been performing was during a period of three to five months after I began the Game. That was about four years ago. There's not much more to say about the awful numbers at this point in time. Instead, read 'em and weep. Year- History to-Date History Annualized Gorilla Game -74.77% -39.16% -10.60% Nasdaq -33.32% -27.95% -6.64% S&P 500 -23.16% -20.56% -4.69% The numbers for Siebel Systems as of the close of market, October 29, 2002: Change 5/25/98 5/1/99 4/11/00 Current From First Buy Price Buy Price Buy Price Price Purchase SEBL $5.75 $9.61 $52.47 $6.97 21.22% The Final Tally Stocks $5,980.26 Cash 104.08 Total $6,084.34 Details about the Game The Front Office Gorilla Game (not a real-money portfolio) was begun with $10,000 and four stocks in equal dollar amounts on May 25, 1998. Using the rules of the Game, I gradually eliminated all gorilla candidates until only the stock of the Gorilla (Siebel) remained as it does today. Commissions are based on $8 per trade. The value of earnings on invested cash is not calculated. Those earnings would have been so insignificant that no meaningful lesson could have been learned from them. And last, the most important stuff ... CAVEAT: I own shares of Siebel Systems. In the past I have owned long and short positions of Siebel's competitors (including some that were at one time "in the Game") and reserve the right to do so in the future. Most important, please, please don't make any investment decisions based on anything coming from my keyboard. Do your own homework! --Mike Buckley