We are seeing a real recovery in tech revenue and earnings, and we look at 2004 being a reasonably good year for the economy. The question is: Does the outlook really support the market run and the valuations we put on those companies?
We know how to value companies. And we go where the value is.
What we really like about the European companies is their ability to expand east.
Right now it's wonderful to celebrate good earnings growth in the first quarter and nice growth in the second quarter, but it's going to get a heck of a lot harder in the third and fourth quarters.
If we have significant refinery capacity problems due to Katrina, that certainly puts more upward pressure on gas prices, which in turn I think has to affect restaurant demand.
Oracle had a nice run and no longer fit our value parameters.
I was hoping that there would be a dividend boost. But the company did just put it into place, so maybe the hopes were overly optimistic.
What you've seen out there is nutty. It doesn't make any sense.
When you have stocks that are doubling in value in a few weeks when there's no significant change in fundamentals, that's all you can hope for. It's not worth hanging onto any longer.
We had a great deal of exposure to China last year but we've been reducing it mainly due to value not being there at the moment.
We've been steadily climbing the market cap scale.
It would suggest to me that they are not experiencing any meaningful improvement in their sales figure. They just can't seem to strike a message that consumers respond to. This is an attempt to bring in fresh thinking to help John turn the company back in the right direction.
The stocks are not cheap anymore but there aren't many alternatives out there. Good opportunities are hard to find in this market.
The Sony brand remains very powerful. Competitors have managed to hammer away but the brand is still well-known and stands for high quality. They've got to become the company that they used to be, which was highly innovative.
The valuations of newspaper stocks have become exceptionally attractive because the outlook on these companies has become particularly negative.
This company has made a huge change over the years from basically a bankrupt company to a very successful one.
A lot of the higher profile names were too expensive for us to begin with. But if you take a long-term view of China, it's a great place to be. We do own some stocks there that are still reasonably good buys.
There seems to be some real momentum building at Nissan.
It's the single biggest issue out there for the stock market, yet most investors have their heads in the sand. We're talking about $100 a month families won't be spending at malls, movie theaters, and restaurants.
The revenue numbers looked really impressive. There were concerns out there about how Microsoft would grow the top line.
I'm not worried about earnings, but there may be a limited upside for the market because of where valuations are.
In spite of clear budgetary constraints, there hasn't been any attempt to reign in defense spending.
In the late 1990s and early 2000 nobody cared how high prices were and how high valuations got. Now, nobody cares how low they go.
I don't see Microsoft ever being considered a high-growth company again.