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To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (22164)	5/16/1998 3:16:00 PM
From: mph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

Gee Chuzzy, I didn't think there was going to be a pop-quiz!<g> mph

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (22164)	5/16/1998 4:56:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 95453

Okay, ladies I'm all ears. My perspective. This is the sort of thing I run across when I follow a tech thread: The card is available and selling now and will work with the current non-existent IEEE 1394 hardware products. 62 devices can be hooked up to it and all you need is a PCI slot. Now tell me there is not huge future demand for this card with all of the slots and bays being max'ed out on the whole installed base of PCI computers out there now; this thing is going to be dynamite! Well, since I don't know what a "current non-existent IEEE hardware product" is, or a PCI slot, or a bay, or a PCI computer, I have trouble assessing whether whatever it is is going to be dynamite or not. (Why do I have this compulsion to confess my weaknesses?) As I've said before, I use my computer the way I drive my car: I can do both, but don't ask me what's under the hood! Now, oil -- that's another story! There's this black gook in the ground. People need it for all sorts of things. Companies try to get this black gook out, one way or another, and then they try to sell it (hopefully, at a high price, but, if they dig out too much of it, they have to settle for a lower price). What's not to understand? Ah, but you mean you don't understand prices for tech stocks and for oil service stocks. There you are talking psychology. As the Russians say, "the soul of another is shrouded in darkness." And may I suggest that you were lucky with your tech stocks -- or that you are simply a brilliant stock picker. Over the years, I have had tech stocks that went down, abruptly, Big Time. And they were not fly-by-night, frothy internet companies, either. Big name stocks, like Adaptec and 3-Com. Fortunately, I had held those two so long that even after crashing they were worth a heck of a lot more than what I paid for them. But Western Digital? That looked like a true value play. What an unexpected disappointment (and blow to the wallet) it proved to be! jbe P.S. Another question for you, Chuzzlewit. What do you think of the concept of "enterprise value" and of "enterprise value/sales" as a valuation ratio? Motley Fool is heavily into this, and I notice that an interesting article about telecommunications stocks in Barron's today also stresses the usefulness of the enterprise value/sales ratio (for identifying takeover candidates). Knowing that you have little use for price/sales as a valuation ratio, I wonder what you make of these two criteria.