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Technology Stocks : Phoenix Technologies (PTEC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (3038)	1/16/1999 11:29:00 AM
From: Mark Brophy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3624

Re: Contest stock selection philosophy Regards SAP....What do you mean by a North American company? Do you mean the headquarters here? All the plants here? All the people here? I'm looking for SEC filings, especially the 10-K. After you've read the 10-K for a company, you're in a position to ask intelligent questions to the people on the SI threads who've been following the company for a while. Even more useful than the 10-K is the IPO or secondary offering prospectus, or a takeover proxy. I'd recommend to anyone researching Phoenix to start with the Award IPO prospectus and the Award/Phoenix joint takeover proxy. How would you classify Applied Materials? They're based in Santa Clara and make SEC filings, so they're a U.S. company. Canada has similar requirements for their companies. SAP is on the NYSE, that should be enough of a qualifier. If you can provide some links to documents similar to the 10-K and it meets the financial requirements, I'll accept it. SAP has blown up in the face of many people recently (and Baan blew up last year) and I suspect that part of the reason is that they weren't aware that it was (still is?) an expensive company with a lot of success built into the stock price. Who cares about profiles on SI?? Is that so it will simply be easy to look up information on the company? 1) An SI profile indicates that it's a computer/electronics/semiconductor/software technology company of some prominence with a following rather than a medical or basic industry stock. 2) You can see at a glance whether the company is priced like a growth stock or a value stock. If it's a growth stock, there's no margin for error and SAP is a good example of how you can get burned. Even a company such as Wind River with a steller record in the past year has failed to rise because their success is already accounted for in the high stock price. 3) You can examine the past 6 quarters of earnings and quickly figure out whether earnings are growing, stagnating, declining, or the company is losing money. 4) You can peruse the old messages in the threads to identify the issues and points of contention and form your own opinion, and/or ask further questions of the regular participants. 5) I'm promoting the use of Silicon Investor because I believe it's one of the best uses of the Internet. Too many companies with foolish ideas have been funded by venture capitalists because they know the companies can be sold to the public that is collectively too dumb to be able to separate the Internet sector winners from losers. The contest is based on the investing philosophy that the greatest profits are made with the least amount of risk by identifying companies that transform from value stocks to growth stocks with simultaneous expansion of both earnings and P/E ratio. The success of this philosophy can be shown by comparing the performance of the value stocks in the Phoenix thread portfolio to the speculative stocks in the Intel portfolio. The Intel portfolio identified 2 out of 11 companies that have more than doubled in the past year (C/Net and Xircom), while the Phoenix thread managed to identify only a single company that more than doubled (VISX). Nevertheless, the Phoenix thread portfolio has outperformed Intel by 33% to 14% because Intel lost money on 7 of 11 stocks, while the thread chose losers on only 7 of 17 stocks. Tim Oliver identified Xircom as a value stock over a year ago, so I'd argue that Intel would've done even worse if that value stock hadn't been in their portfolio. Even if you have enough money to diversify among a large group of speculative stocks, it's foolish to expose yourself to extra risks when you're unlikely to reap extra rewards. Nevertheless, most investors do so because it's part of human nature. Las Vegas preys on this tendency by giving you a poorer payout (30-1) on a roulette wheel with a 1-36 chance of winning than it does on nearly 50-50 chance games such as blackjack and craps. There were a lot of rejections last year, too. However, the vastly superior performance of the thread portfolio compared to the Intel portfolio and the Russell 2000 shows that it pays to be picky. Is it really that difficult to find a North American tech company with a P/E less than 30? If so, then we should sell all our stocks and wait for the return of the giveaway prices we saw 4 months ago.