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Technology Stocks : Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Davison who wrote (6041)	4/15/1999 2:20:00 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 14451

FWIW fm: Street.com Herb on TheStreet: One Money Manager's Favorite Stocks for a Dow 10,000 or 2000 World By Herb Greenberg Senior Columnist When we left Jim Marquez of the Bayou Fund, a private hedge fund in Stamford, Conn., last week, he was singing the praises of Fluor (FLR:NYSE), an out-of-favor, $13 billion engineering and construction firm that was loaded with assets but was trading at a sharp discount to its revenues. Here's a guy who spends much of his day aggressively trading stocks, yet he saddles himself with a dud like Fluor and, as it turns out, a whole list of what he likes to call "extreme value" stocks. These are stocks that have assets or cash and a trigger, such as a restructuring or the possibility of a takeover, that can cause the stock price to rise. But not immediately. For these investments, momentum and growth are irrelevant. "We will readily buy a company with a heavy debt load if that company has assets sufficient to pay off the debt and gives stockholders a premium, even on a complete liquidation," Marquez says. He adds, "For this type of investment it doesn't matter if the market is at 10,000 or 2000." Examples of his long positions include: *Silicon Graphics (SGI:NYSE): You gotta be kidding? No, he isn't. This company can't seem to be able to get out of its own way thanks to a series of missteps and losses. Its stock closed at 12 1/2 on Friday but rose as high as the mid-40s in 1995. However, Marquez is attracted by $3 per share in gross cash. The company also owns roughly 85% of MIPS Technologies (MIPS:Nasdaq), a former division, part of which was spun off last June. Silicon Graphics has said it plans to sell the rest by September of 2000. In addition, privately-held Alias/Wavefront, another subsidiary, is valued by some analysts at roughly $3 per share. "Even with capital gains tax taken out, the [workstation] manufacturing business is valued at zero by the stock market, so I'll take my chances it will be worth something more than nothing soon." He adds that the company's new products have been getting good reviews. But what about execution? Jim Cramer took the company to task last week for not being able to execute. Maybe, but that's what they said about Digital Equipment, Marquez says, "and Compaq (CPQ:NYSE) bought it at twice the price it was trading for. And in its worse days Digital never got as cheap as this. "You're paid to wait, because when a balance sheet is as rich as this you can't get in any more trouble."

To: Jim Davison who wrote (6041)	4/15/1999 11:23:00 PM
From: ramin shahidi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14451

Jim, per your request, my interpretation of SGI-VW is the tail of: The good: Fast graphics and good looks. Don't underestimate the image processing capabilities of this machine. It is performing almost twice as fact as HP-FX6 for almost 1/2 of the price (~6K with normal 21'monitor). The video processing capabilities along with its firewire capabilities are not any short of being excellent. Also you have to love the flat panel monitor (add $2k) and the sexy looks of this machine.. It really stands out.. The Bad: the machine is not as stable as I initially assessed it. It crashes often, specially on any software that SGI has developed for it. For instance it crashes on SGi demos and when it runs the only SGI made screen saver, it has (the same one which was demoed at Comdex last year). It crashes when running netscape, so you better use MS Explorer. Almost all of its software is not compatible with off the shelf software, and has to be loaded from the SGI site, and they are mainly not up to date (few generations back in some cases). Most of the hardware stuff, are not compatible with the market (ie., memory, SCSI, etc..) The PCI card is an old design and the list goes on.. The UGLY.. The marketing, The production, The support.. I don't think I need to go any further on these. Buy one and you will find out.