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Gold/Mining/Energy : JDS Fitel -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn McDougall who wrote (776)	3/14/1999 6:44:00 PM
From: Glenn McDougall	Respond to of 815

Readers Come Through with Net-Upgrade Plays By James J. Cramer 03/12/99 08:02 AM ET Anyone who doubts the beauty of the stock market's pricing mechanisms should just look in my mailbox after the piece I wrote asking for help in trying to play the Internet upgrade cycle. Within 10 minutes of the piece hitting the site, my mailbox was flooded with all sorts of cogent ideas about the best ways to profit from what we all know is happening. Amazingly, the letters I received quickly break down to three major themes: bandwidth, in which everyone wants to play Qwest (QWST:Nasdaq), Corning (GLW:NYSE) and Uniphase (UNPH:Nasdaq); retail, where people want Best Buy (BBY:NYSE) and Circuit City (CC:NYSE); and cable modems, in which people want to bet on @Home (ATHM:Nasdaq). Of course there are other outliers and many off-the-wallers. There are the Dellionaires, who all insist that the way to play this is Dell (DELL:Nasdaq), but they might think the way to play world peace is through Dell -- or through universal healthcare, for that matter. There are the people who want to buy Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq), even though I think that company may be the antithesis of how to play this cycle, at least right now. There are people who want to play it through 3Com (COMS:Nasdaq), but these are the same ones who keep getting upset when I call this last-place team a last-place team. And there are people who say that I'm wrong and stupid and that there is no upgrade cycle, but these are the same people who think I was sired by Nosferatu out of Eva Braun. They have to have their due, though, I guess. The reason why I laud the pricing mechanism of the market is that the vast majority of these themes dominate the new-high list daily. You could have gotten most of these ideas if you simply bought momentum or looked at charts. The charts told you these stocks were on fire, and the reason they are on fire is because of the upgrade cycle. I know I am going to have to go back into Uniphase, Corning and Qwest, which I stupidly sold, as soon as they come in. These are obvious winners to me now after I read this great correspondence. As always, thanks to you, our readers, for getting it right. And no thanks to my friends at 2 Rector, where TheStreet.com is put out. I always have a tense relationship with these guys. I can't speak to anyone other than the editor-in-chief, and I can't demand that anything get done. But as soon as I saw the greatness of the responses, the thoughtfulness and the depth of them, I urged for the letters to be posted on the site. I had to urge three times, and the letters still didn't go up -- and then when they finally did, they got taken down by mistake! When I finally saw them, only a fraction of the letters actually made it onto the site. There is not accountability to me over there whatsoever, to the point where often I think that if the man on the moon wanted something done at TheStreet.com, he would have more luck than I have. Pathetic. Particularly when you realize that the rest of the journalism world thinks I run TheStreet.com out of my back pocket. Which is why I wrote this piece. I know there is a Chinese wall between me and TheStreet, but it doesn't have to be a Berlin Wall -- with me on the west side of it. Random musings: TheStreet.com breaks this unbelievably great story about TokyoMex, a guy I have heard and read about roughly a gazillion times on CNBC and The Wall Street Journal. But I guess because it was TheStreet.com that broke it, nobody else will pick it up. As aggrieved as I often feel about how 2 Rector treats me, it makes me sick the way people at the Journal et al. ignore TheStreet.com's scoops. The longest thing I have read about TheStreet.com in the Journal is the risk factors of the prospectus. Hoo-hah -- at least one time, in the millions of deals that I have read risk factors for, these got printed almost verbatim. No wonder people hate the press; the jealousies are worse than academia and politics. Makes my stomach turn. James J. Cramer is manager of a hedge fund and co-founder of TheStreet.com. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. Cramer's writings provide insights into the dynamics of money management and are not a solicitation for transactions. While he cannot provide investment advice or recommendations, he invites you to comment on his column by sending a letter to TheStreet.com.