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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gregg Powers who wrote (10926)	5/27/1998 11:48:00 PM
From: JGoren	Respond to of 152472

Hear, hear, Gregg. Any management consultant (or even Wharton grad such as myself) will tell you that the most precarious time for a business is managing the growth. Many companies cannot handle a lot of growth and fail even though the market is there for the product. I have never bult a business (being a tassle loafered lawyer, myself), but I am frankly astounded how few the problems have been that Qcom has encountered during the explosive growth of the last 18 months.

To: Gregg Powers who wrote (10926)	5/28/1998 11:58:00 AM
From: waitwatchwander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

OT Gregg, I appreciate your insights. I couldn't help but think of your elevator analogy when I came across this article. United States Bungee jumping 'safe' ASSOCIATED PRESS in Milwaukee Taking the plunge may not be so risky after all. A study of 100 bungee jumpers found that leaping off a 40-metre-high platform with only an elastic cord tied around your ankles is not as dangerous as it sounds. Parachuting, pole vaulting and platform diving were worse on the body, said researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin. The physicians studied bungee jumpers to see whether they suffered any ailments in the week after jumping. "I give it an extremely clean bill of health," Melbourne Boynton, the study's co-author, said on Monday. The study revealed that two million people had tried bungee jumping in the past decade. Of those tested, 42 reported 59 minor medical complaints or symptoms. Immediate symptoms included pain in the ankles, neck, back and chest, and neurological complaints such as dizziness, headaches and blurred vision. The symptoms disappeared within a week. However, the effects of long-term, repeated bungee jumping are not known. SCMP Contact Information \| Letters To The Editor Copyright c1998 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All Rights Reserved. PS Spending time on SI seems to enhance the immediate effects. However, being in it for the long term, I enjoy the folksee headwork and patiently await the fly back. Thanx again, nf

To: Gregg Powers who wrote (10926)	6/4/1998 1:46:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Gregg, your post 27 May worrying that we have reached the penthouse suite and that the bubble might burst. Money seems to be treated like metres or kilograms - as though it is some immutable standard. [Let's not look too closely at metres or kilograms or we'll have to conclude that there really is nothing immutable in this world - they are reasonably solid from our limited point of view]. Money is infinitely elastic. Real value is in Qualcomm and their ilk. Money used to be tied to gold, but those days are long gone. It is now tied only to the Fed whim and sense of stability and the political system backing that up. Overlaid on that is the stockmarket, which we all measure using Alan Greenspan's elastic band. As he stretches the elastic band, the asset value we report has to stretch too since the money represents the value in the community which is a measure of the productive value which is sort of the stockmarket. For a couple of decades, well, most of the century, the elastic band has been stretching really quickly. Printing printing printing. Until the US$ was delinked from gold in the early 70s, the stretching was relatively slow. Over 20 years, quite a few stock pickers have become acclimatized to this happy stretching and the market has soared. The stretching isn't too apparent because of the massive reduction in costs thanks to Qualcomm and their ilk inventing ever more efficient tools. I wrote a long list a while ago. New Zealand has even enshrined the process in law! The consumer price index shall stay between 1% and 3% inflation. That means that as computers halve in price [and cars, tvs, phones, washing machines, meat, rice and everything else], the money supply has to be pumped up to keep inflation at zero. That means that savers of money think that they are doing okay getting 6% or so since there is no inflation and they haven't figured out that they are being diddled! That means a transfer of wealth from savers of money to borrowers of money. The borrowers see their stocks zooming, so they are addicted too. Many shareholders are of course cagey these days and don't borrow, in fear of margin calls. Now to the market. Every man and his dog is an investment expert since the markets have soared for decades in the USA. They are not discriminating too finely between Yahoo! and Qualcomm. All ships have risen on the tide - apart from quite a few failures. Is the tide at full tide? Nope!~ Printing will continue, but there will be ups and downs of maybe 20% during the ascent. Technology development is showing no signs of abating and billions of people are globalizing, to coin a cliche. Japan bubbled and burst. Korea borrowed and crashed. New Zealand did a Korea but way back in 1987. The wheat and the chaff get sorted out in the strong winds. The good companies drop a chunk in price, then just carry on growing. The fakes go bust. Discrimination is the name of the game. Qualcomm seems to have all the attributes for long term success. The high P:E mature companies must be fairly dodgy now. So I say a compound 15% per year for years to come [cometary impacts aside] but with some roller coasters to shake off the improvident, fake, overpriced, overborrowed, with no real technology development process. Nowhere near the penthouse suite! No bear market, just 15% or 20% swings. And even if monkeys handle the buy and sell orders, half of them will be winners. And you can't really tell whether you are a monkey or a smart investor. Even if the others are really hairy looking. Scary eh! Am I my brother's keeper? Or am I my keeper's brother. Asks the chimp in the zoo. Sometimes the one which should be caged is not too evident. Well, that's how this chimp sees it. Mqurice Dow 16000 Feb 2002