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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: van wang who wrote (22983)	3/22/1998 4:35:00 PM
From: Luc Glinas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Where did you get that Buffet will put his nose in CPQ??

To: van wang who wrote (22983)	3/22/1998 5:46:00 PM
From: E.H.F.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

I think of the P/E at any given time as being the spontaneous market perception as to what a stock's price is worth. I used 20 because that's what the P/E was at the end of fiscal 97 (20.8). I think that their eps growth will continue because the market is there. With declining margins, there's also declining costs, and CPQ should emerge, IMHO, as the dominant low cost provider. I can't remember what their world market share is...low twenties or high teens I believe...it's in their annual report, but I believe their growth rates will at least remain what they are now. I don't look at the current P/E when I make a decision to buy. What I do is look at their historical growth rate over the longest period that I can come up with, and in this case it was the years 1991 - 1997. I figure out what the growth rate is compounded, and then decide whether this can be maintained. Then I take the current estimations (in this case I used the lowest one of .68), and ran the growth rate out to a period of ten years. Then, taking that estimated eps ten years out I applied a P/E of 20 to it, looked at today's price of $23 and figured out what the compounded annual gain is to get from a price of $23 to what I estimated ten years out. Even using a P/E of 7 I would still be getting a return of over 15% compounded annually. Now all of this is an estimation. I'll keep re-evaluating CPQ as time goes on. Right now I see a good future for them, and I like the way they are expanding their products and services. MSFT is good too, but I'm worried about the DOJ so I'm steering clear. I think the best stock of all, based on the way that I figure things out is Harley Davidson. E.H.F.

To: van wang who wrote (22983)	3/22/1998 5:55:00 PM
From: E.H.F.	Respond to of 97611

I'm saying that Harley Davidson is the best because their growth rate estimations come with a high degree of predictable certainty, IMHO. E.H.F.

To: van wang who wrote (22983)	3/22/1998 6:11:00 PM
From: ed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

In Asia, Japan is king in Autos, Consumer electronics, but not computers.Of course , you can buy a cheap computer in the mall according to your spec, i.e size of memory, speed of cd-rom, ...etc in Hong Kong, the question is do you ever think about the quality you are buying? Your computer will not go through the system burn in process, they may tell you the CPU is Pentium 166 Mhrz, but in reality what you got is Pentium 133 Mhrz, The may tell you that you got a 20X CD_rom , but in reality what you got is 10X . They may tell you that you got 16 MB dram, but in reality you got 8 MB.... etc, so you may end up with paying more for lower quality computers. That is my experience in Taiwan. Probably that is the reason that even the Hong Kong security office would rather spend !MM USD to buy PCs from CPQ , instead of buying cheap PCs in the Hong Kong Gray market . In China, If the government or big corp buying PCs, they always buy from big brand, because the persons who are responsible for the purchase would not like to run the risk of buying PCs with secondary quality and which will be blamed by his boss, and all in all its the government who pay , not paid with his own money.