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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (36208)	11/14/1998 1:38:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 132070

To All, Media review: Barron's. 1. A letter from a brilliant Houstonian is published under the squib, "Dismal Science," in the Mailbag section this week. Alas, it is nothing new for participants on this thread. Just the same comments I made about Paul Krugman when last week's profile appeared. The letter after mine was much more vicious. Hopefully, Krugman's students will tack them on the dais before he delivers his lectures. <G> 2. Abelson takes a very weak jab at Intel's tout-a-scama announcement last week. No mention of the annual decline in eps, the fact that even after this seasonal "miracle," quarterly eps will be about the same as in 1996, or even a question about how Intel could know all this with most of the quarter still in front of them. I hope he is not losing a step. 3. However, Abelson is right on about the SIA flapdoodle projections and he is the first one in the media to print the fact that the SIA was predicting 17% growth for chips this year. They weren't that far off except for the fact they forgot the negative sign. <G> 4. A couple of oddball fluff pieces on mutual fund managers. First, there is one about a genius income fund manager at Janus who has made 8% so far this year. That is even a little more than I made in my income portfolio THIS QUARTER. <G> (O.K., it was a good quarter, but still, I am beating this guy by at least 80% so far this year) The idea that income funds should perform poorly in a year of declining rates makes me laugh. In what environment do they perform well? Yes, he outperformed his peers. But his peers were Larry, Darryl, and Larry's other brother, Darryl. <G> The other portfolio manager is a very nice guy named Kippes from Houston based Aim who manages their Aggressive Growth Fund. which has a 3 year return of 16%. A wee bit less than a T-Bill, but, you get a lot more risk for your money. The problem is not with Mr. Kippes. The problem is with the attitude that you sink or swim with a restricted portfolio. He had to choose investments from a list of very small cap stocks and those underperformed woefully. This is like sending a quarterback on the field with instructions not to call a running play and all passes must be made to one receiver. In other words, you have lost the game before you start, and it really doesn't even matter whether the quarterback is Joe Montana and the receiver is Jerry Rice. Of course, in the goofus theory of mutual fund management, you don't have to make a decent return. You have to beat other funds that are as idiotically restricted as you are. 5. Roundtable on Asia stocks. Old hat. 6. A mini roundtable of fund managers who want to buy high, sell low again. Illiterate's Business Daily: yes, I sometimes buy this rag on the weekends to see if it has gotten any better. It hasn't. The only interesting stuff was an interview with publisher Bill O'Neill. Bill, for those who don't know his history, was one of the first momentum geek mutual fund gunslingers in the 1960s and I have a grudge against him because I bought his fund when I was callow and inexperienced. And watched my $50 become $32 almost overnight. <G> After being run out of Fundville on a rail, he did some TA newsletter crapola and then started IBD, where he touts his Can'tSwim style of buying what went up yesterday. Anyway, ol' Bill made a comment I agreed with, shocking me no end. He said, concentrate on the investment first and consider taxes second. Is he getting wiser or is this a blind squirrel finding an acorn? <G> The most interesting thing in IBD was an 8 page ad from Compaq about their new direct model for businesses. Boy, I bet that was cheap. <G> MB