Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks and Mutual Funds: Proven Strategies for Picking High-Growth Winners - Hardcover

Murphy, Michael

 
9780767904568: Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks and Mutual Funds: Proven Strategies for Picking High-Growth Winners
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767904567 ISBN 13: 9780767904568
Verlag: Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Del, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

An updated new version of a Business Week bestseller by a leading investment advisor takes the mystery out of high technology stocks, offering a clear analysis of the key companies, predictions of their performance, and investment formulas.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Murphy is the founder and editor of the California Technology Stock Letter, which was rated the #1 investment newsletter by Forbes in 1996. Featured monthly in Worth as an investment expert, he is also quoted frequently throughout other business media and speaks at high-tech conferences nationwide. Murphy is also a frequent guest on CNBC and CNN. He lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

Aus dem Klappentext

new information, including:

The newest ways to invest in Internet stocks
Recent biotech developments and their effect on the market
Latest trends in high-tech consumer products

Updated and revised for the Third Edition, this national bestseller shows you how investing in high-tech can make you rich--even if you don't understand the technology.

How do you find the next Cisco or Intel? How can you avoid losing your shirt on start-up companies that suddenly fizzle and die? And how can techies and non-techies alike get the edge on Wall Street's booming high-technology sector?

Whether the stock market is enjoying an explosive bull run or retreating in the face of a possible bear market, the world of high-tech has become the most important investment opportunity of our time. Now, in this latest revised edition of Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks and Mutual Funds, Michael Murphy shows that you don't have to be an engin

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Why Buy Technology?

Economies usually evolve slowly, but from time to time they go through a rapid, wrenching change that creates massive new opportunities at the same time that old structures are destroyed.  Each of these revolutions is caused by the emergence of a new underlying economic driver and brings with it new infrastructures that change society.  We are living through one of those major changes right now, and it is creating once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to build new wealth.  

When you are living through it, it can be hard to put it in perspective.  But ten thousand years back, your great-great-great-great-granddaddy was a hunter-gatherer.  The economic driver was meat protein.  Always on the move, taking food and shelter as it came along, he rarely deferred current consumption to make investments that would pay off in the future.  

Not that there were many investment choices.  Great-granddaddy and his mate may have smoked or salted meat to save for the winter, but that was pretty much the limit of their ability to invest for the future.  They didn't build wealth, and there wasn't much of an infrastructure--animal trails through the woods were about it.  

Then--paradigm shift!--life evolved to an agrarian society where your great-grandparents8 farmed the land, saved seeds for next year's crop, developed water systems, and built houses.  Towns grew up to market crops and provide a center to buy supplies.  The agrarian society lasted for thousands of years--until three hundred years ago, give or take.  

What drove wealth building in this new society was land and crops.  If you owned land, you were wealthy.  If not, not.  The enabling technology was pretty much hand tools and horses.  The infrastructure was dirt roads and couriers on horseback.  

The United States was discovered and settled toward the end of this period.  Having a limitless supply of land, lots of water, and not many regulations, the pioneers grew great wealth rapidly.  (Hong Kong did the same thing over the last fifty years on only 400 square miles, so we know that land isn't the issue anymore.)

Then came the industrial revolution, driven by cheap steel and a flood of new inventions.  Wealth grew in steel, industrial machinery, coal, and transportation.  The infrastructure changed to railroads, shipping, and the telegraph.  The important economic indicators changed to coal, iron and steel production, patent applications, and railroad operating income.  

Great family fortunes were built in these new areas; names we still know like Morgan, Bessemer, Vanderbilt, Astor.  Although investors still could make money buying and selling in the agrarian economy, it was much easier to get the wind at their backs investing in the new areas, side by side with the entrepreneurs.  

But they weren't dubbed "entrepreneurs" in those days.  They were called "robber barons."

After World War I, the United States and most of the developed world shifted to mass production and consumer-based economies, thanks, in some measure, to Henry Ford.  The economic driver changed to cheap energy--especially oil.  The middle class grew faster, with enough income and an enabling technology (the automobile) to move out of the noisy, polluted cities.  They did not have to live within walking distance of the factory anymore.  

The growth industries changed to autos, housing, and retailing.  The infrastructure changed to highways, airports, telephones, and broadcasting.  The important economic indicators changed to retail sales, auto sales, housing starts, and capacity utilization.  

Again the great new family fortunes were built in these areas.  The automobile families were the royalty of the Midwest; home building created numerous multimillionaires after World War II.  The Walton (WalMart) success story may be the last example of that era.  Again, investors earned the highest returns by focusing on the rapid growth areas in the new economy.  

Then came the technology economy.  

Like all generalizations, it's easy to argue about when the Digital Age began.  Mainframe computers went commercial in the 1950s; Digital Equipment Corporation was founded in 1957.  But it was the demands of the Department of Defense plus NASA that drove the process of miniaturization to the point where Fairchild invented semiconductors.  And Intel, descendant of Fairchild, gave birth to the microprocessor in 1971.  

Microprocessors powered the digital watches and hand-held calculators of the mid-1970s.  By the late 1970s, personal computers were spreading by the tens of thousands.  Apple computers could even be seen on the desks of non-wonks in ordinary companies.  

But this was not yet the Age of Empowerment where anyone could own a personal computer for less than $5,000 and make it do useful things.  It took IBM to put the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on personal computers by coming out with its own in 1981, clearly marking the latest change in the economy.  

Now there's no question: this is the technology economy, and the economic driver is ever-cheaper semiconductors.  Underlying all the advances in computing and communications are unbelievable price drops in semiconductor chips.  Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, propounded Moore's Law twenty years ago:

The Cost of Making a Semiconductor Drops 50 Percent Every Eighteen Months

He's been right thus far, and we expect his law will continue to hold true for the next ten years at least, at which time the physical limitations of silicon may force a rethinking of the whole technology.  But you never know.  Ten years ago, it was thought that microprocessors could never go faster than 100 megahertz.  Now you can buy 300 megahertz Intel processors, and people are waiting impatiently for 500 megahertz.  

The growth industries in the new economy are computers, software, semiconductors, communications, and medical technology, and the infrastructure is changing to satellites, fiber optics, networks, and wireless connectivity.  Again, the great new family fortunes are being built in these areas--just ask Bill Gates, or Jim Clark of Netscape.  

So how do we measure this?

Of course, the relevant economic indicators have changed again.  It's just that the government and the media haven't quite figured it out.  

We still get ten-day auto-sales figures; where are ten-day computer sales figures?

Why don't we hear about the high-tech trade balance (which shows a multibillion-dollar surplus)?

How about knowledge-intensive employment, which grew rapidly through the last recession and continues to show little unemployment?  Of the U.S.  regions with the fastest job growth in the early 1990s, San Jose and San Francisco (at either end of Silicon Valley) were first and third.  

How about the deflation in high-tech prices, which drop reliably every year?  One hundred megabytes of hard-disk-drive storage cost $250 in 1988, $50 in 1993, and $12 in 1998.  

Year after year, technology companies grow about 20 percent with no inflation, while the rest of the economy plods along at 2 percent to 3 percent real growth.  Although technology started as a...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Del
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767904567
ISBN 13 
9780767904568
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
3
Anzahl der Seiten
309
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780767900201: Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks and Mutual Funds: Proven Strategies for Picking High

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0767900200 ISBN 13:  9780767900201
Verlag: Broadway Books (A Division of Ba..., 1997
Hardcover