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Pastimes : A Jackass, his PAL(indrome), and GOLD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (476)	1/29/2003 12:25:52 PM
From: mt_mike	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1210

I think we will "win" in Iraq fairly easily. I think most Iraqi troops will lay down their weapons and not want to fight. However, we will have to have a presence for a long time and US troops in Iraq will be an easy target (think Marine barracks in Beirut, hotel in Saudi Arabia). One of the goals of Al Queada and other Islamic groups is to weaken the US economy. Going into Iraq plays right into their hands. Step 1 isolate the US and the economy dies under its own choking debt load as foreigners abandon US assets for Euros and then gold. The big question is when does the switch from Euros to gold take place. Still busy but not traveling which makes things easier.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (476)	1/29/2003 1:23:47 PM
From: pogbull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1210

Tech revival at least 15 years off Financial Post - Wednesday January 29, 2003 finance.canada.com By Jonathan Chevreau Don Coxe has 'zero hope for the Nasdaq' If you're praying for the bull market to return, don't expect it to start with technology stocks. There's "zero hope for the Nasdaq" exchange where the big-name tech stocks trade, says Don Coxe, chairman and chief strategist for Harris Investment Management. In a media conference call yesterday, Coxe didn't mince words about the dire state of the U.S. economy and stock market. "Too many people believe that once the economy comes back, tech stocks will come back. But that game is over. They won't be back for 15 or 20 years." His pessimism is grounded in researching 200 years of history for his book. The New Reality of Wall Street should be published in May, Coxe said in an interview. No stock market folly in the last 200 years came close to the Nasdaq mania that topped out in March, 2000, he says. "The South Sea bubble and Tulipmania were more rational." At the top, Nasdaq stocks traded at 351 times earnings, or 600 times if stock options were included. Despite Iraq war fever, Coxe is more hopeful about the rest of the market. Any rebound will be fuelled by "real companies that don't cheat on earnings and which pay dividends." A Canadian based in Chicago, Coxe is bullish on the TSX and on gold. "The Canadian market is my favourite of the G7." The Canadian dollar is the cheapest and valuations are reasonable since "the Nortel/JDS idiocy has been taken out of values." Coxe expects some Canadian multinational dividend-paying corporations may create two classes of shares: one for American recipients of dividend income; the other for Canadians. The book -- Coxe's first in a 30-year investment career -- looks at six historic "triple waterfall crashes." A triple waterfall has three up stages over three years: optimism, faith and fanaticism. That's followed by three stages down, which has always taken at least 17 years to unwind. Previous triple waterfalls were the great crash of 1929; the Nifty Fifty of the 1970s; the three inflation-hedge crashes of silver, gold and oil stocks in the early 1980s; and the 1990 crash of the Japanese stock market. Charts of triple waterfalls are identical when overlaid on each other, including the ongoing crash of the Nasdaq techs. "The important point is tech stocks are not coming back," Coxe says. "Triple waterfalls are caused by shared mistakes where everyone believes, including the elite and politicians, not just those in the market." Each period featured a unique belief system. In 1929 it was that equities were safer than bonds. With the Nifty 50 (Xerox, Polaroid etc.) it was that a group of stocks could be immune to economic risk. With Japan it was a belief it could set its own prices on anything. With modern tech stocks it was a belief revenue and earnings growth could go on forever. But Coxe says there are no more than five techs which are true growth stocks. Except for Microsoft Corp., most techs demonstrate extreme cyclicality: "as much as any base metal stock but base metals stocks don't grow to 300 times earnings." Any rally led by the techs -- as occurred earlier this month -- should be sold because it indicates a bottom has not yet been reached. Growth mutual funds should not have owned techs but favoured instead "true growth stocks" like Procter and Gamble, or drug or health sciences stocks. Coxe thinks investors should avoid Nasdaq index funds or exchange-traded funds like the QQQs, but believes actively managed science and technology funds can be owned if they're overweight health care or defence stocks. He's more cautious about computers and telecom but even so owns some in the fund he manages: Bank of Montreal's U.S. Value fund. "I have to own tech stocks in the fund because we are a relative value fund. So I try to buy the ones I hope I'll lose the least on." It's aimed at people who own just one U.S. mutual fund, so "for them it's a good product." The fund owns AOL, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Dell, Microsoft, Symantec and "even Cisco. I shudder about it but it comes out okay on the model." Too many tech companies are run for the benefit of insiders with stock options, not shareholders, he says. They are a bigger problem than the crooks behind the handful of fraudulent enterprises like Enron and WorldCom. Coxe says the real harm was done by people who didn't do anything dishonest or illegal. "They're the ones I attack in the book, not the crooks." I can hardly wait for the movie.