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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (926)	4/1/1999 4:51:00 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

I moved 8.5% of my portfolio out of softy and into QCOM yesterday, and am up 13.5% on it already. I see QCOM at 250 by this summer. It is the hottest major (not dot.com)tech stock around, and the first major "Gorilla" to emerge since Moore's Book, "The Gorilla Game" came out. Softy is still 48% of my holdings, and I am going to reduce that to 25% next week. That gives me about 2 to 4 buys to make, depending on the size, I am thinking ATHM, Yahoo, possibly SFE. ABOV is too scary, I think it is a short squeeze that will drop. I would like some opinions on some other "nets". Got any hot tips, you "silver-tongued devils"? LindyBill

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (926)	4/1/1999 6:34:00 PM
From: Frank Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

I've been researching Echostar (NASDAQ: DISH), which runs the Dish Network satellite system. DISH seems to be a Prince with one Gorilla trait. It is a Prince because it is competing with DirectTV (a.k.a. Hughes - NYSE: GMH) for digital mini-dish customers. Probably there will not be a King in this industry. Most new customers are cable TV users who want more channels and better image and sound quality. Soon digital cable TV will start to become available and it will provide benefits similar to DISH Network and DirecTV, so it will be another competitor for the "quality-oriented" viewer. The Gorilla trait is that the satellite systems and digital cable TV all require different set-top-box signal decoder systems. These boxes must be purchased by the customer at a cost of zero to $600, depending on the box features and the amount of subsidy from DISH and GMH. The cost of these boxes is the "switching cost" that will tie customers to DISH, GMH, or digital cable. DISH stock has gone from $20 to $80 in a year, so it is pricey. However, the stock may keep rising, because of the valuable 2.1M customer base they have built, which is rising at about 100,000 monthly. I have done some thinking over on the DISH thread about this: Message 8659668 . I like this stock because the customer base may still be undervalued and it is likely to keep growing strongly for several years. There are no earnings yet, due to the subsidies, marketing, and system construction costs, this might be similar to the first years of cable TV companies. I recall a cable TV company about 15 years ago that had a huge stock price increase during this no-earnings initial phase. Disclaimer - I own some! PS - Incidentally, Broadcom BRCM is into this field as well as the broadband products that most people know about, they makes chips and boards for use with DirecTV.