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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (34982)	12/5/1998 10:46:00 AM
From: Daniel Joo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 94695

Ron, you make some excellent points. The reason companies are careful in their 10Q is to make sure they've covered their behinds in case anything goes wrong. They are relying on other companies to make an assessment of their Y2K risks and fix the bugs for them. Now these Y2K vendors are very careful in making their assessments and maticulous in fixing potential problem areas - again covering their behinds. Remember that vendors who specialize in fixing Y2K problems have been doing it for years now and have become better and quicker at fixing problems. All major companies have been in the process of evaluating all of their major suppliers small and large for Y2K risk exposure. The companies I'm worried about are the ones that wait until mid 99 to fix their problems. However, the media has been so great at hyping Y2K by interviewing lawyers and others who paint Y2K doom case scenarios that an executive would have to have his/her head in the ground and not know that they had better fix their problems now. The mom and pop operations I'm talking about are you neighborhood grocery stores and retail chains etc. As for Europe, most of their companies are already Y2K compliant - hence, we don't see the magnitude of dollars spent on fixing their problems. They are more worried about addressing the EU currency problem with their systems. Most of their systems cannot handle the new currency. As for Asia, who knows? Remember two things - most of their companies are relatively new and running on newer technologies. The reason most US companies are in trouble is because they never bothered to replace the infrastructure they implemented in the late 60s and early 70s. Also, the economic impact of Asia is overblown. Did anyone else notice that Japan - whose economy is twice as large as all the SE Asian econmies combined - has been in a recession for at least 3 years? It seems not to have impacted our economy too much. Most of these countries in SE Asia have protectionist policies that prohibit outsiders from doing a lot of business there. If Europe, Latin America, Canada, and China goes to the pot, we are in trouble. The U.S. and IMF will NOT let Brazil go down - too much at stake. IMHO, the companies in trouble because of Y2K are those that sold and implemented non-Y2K compliant systems to companies in the late 70s and 80s - companies like CA, IBM, Arthur Andersen etc. Lawyers will have a field day filing lawsuits against these companies. Don't get me wrong, IMO there will be problems but it will be more of an exception than the rule. The media, of course, will blow these exceptions out of proportion which means the market will react and more opportunity for me.