DEJA VU II
Go back with me to 1983. You're a money manager. You envision, quite clearly, the great PC boom ahead; a boom that is destined to profoundly change the way we do things. What stocks do you buy to capitalize on this great trend?
Regrettably, most of the "obvious" candidates, back in 1983, never met the test of time. The "obvious" candidates ranged from IBM, the leading manufacturer of PC's whose stock was just a market performer for the next two years -- and a drastic underperformer for years and years after that, all the way to the PC plays that never made it at all from a longer-term standpoint; plays like Hayes, Prime, Seagate, Tandy, Wang et al. As things turned out, the two REALLY big winners that came out of the PC revolution were anything but "obvious" in 1983: the company that made the PC's "brains" and the company that made its operating system.
Time passes; now you're a money manager in 1999. You envision, quite clearly, the great Internet boom ahead; a boom that is destined to profoundly change the way we do things. What stocks do you buy to capitalize on THIS great trend?
Dare I suggest that most of the "obvious" answers to that question will also not meet the test of time? Dare I further suggest that the real answer lies in companies that have locks -- and I mean LOCKS -- on their particular area of expertise, as Intel and Microsoft did? Beyond Cisco, what IS the answer?
-- Walter Deemer