The December 1999 Smart Money (Click here to visit the website)Magazine's list of stocks for the decade beginning 2000:
Other tasty securities:
WARNING!!! Don't buy anything listed here without doing some of your own research and talking to people in the know. This is not brain surgery, but you should spend more time on this than you do looking at Consumer Reports trying to figure out which breakfast cereal suits you best.
Below: From Smart Money, March 2000
THE ULTIMATE TECH PORTFOLIO — MARCH 2000
"I'M RETURNING TO what I love most," said the richest man in the world, "focusing on technologies for the future."
It's not often that a multibillionaire like Bill Gates does anything relevant to the lives of regular people. But there was something urgent, perhaps even desperate, about his recent decision to quit his post as Microsoft (MSFT) CEO to make sure that it completes the final act of its transformation into an Internet-systems company. It was as if he declared that the most important thing in the world is getting straight with the Web.
If you want to get the most out of your stock portfolio, you'd better get straight with the Web, too. The fact is, technology is an ever-shifting industry, and as an investor you need to be well represented in the sectors that will benefit most from the latest changes.
In the following pages, we'll describe 15 stocks in the eight most promising tech sectors right now. These sectors are poised to profit from the latest Internet trends: new consumer services such as streaming video and telephony, and business-to-business (or B2B) networking. These stocks, we believe, make up the Ultimate Tech Portfolio — a group of investments that will truly light a fire under your overall holdings.
Your brokerage account is already stuffed with tech stocks, you say? You've got Microsoft, Intel (INTC), Dell (DELL)? Congratulations. Those companies have done great things for countless portfolios in recent years. But that was before PCs became cheap and plentiful and a guy named Linus Torvalds came along with a new, improved (and free!) computer-operating system: Linux. As recently as three years ago, Iomega's Zip drive, a bright idea for making the traditional desktop computer work better, inspired a buying frenzy among dedicated tech investors. No PC-focused stock could do the same today.
Consider: After we went through the Zacks database and tossed out all the tiny stocks (those with less than $500 million in market value), we found more than 100 companies that had gained at least 250% in the past 52 weeks. That in itself was surprising. We knew this latest tech rally was unprecedented, but that many stocks, up so much?
The Ultimate Tech Portfolio "Value" Stocks
Even more surprising was our discovery that none of the firms on that list — not one — has as its primary business personal computers, desktop peripherals, PC software or components. No Microsoft, no Intel, no Dell. Which leads us to the question every investor must now ask: Are my core tech holdings the must-own stocks of the past or the must-own stocks of the future?
The issue is not simply one of old companies vs. new. Several veteran firms from the list of the greatest stock hits of the '80s — Texas Instruments (TXN), Sun Microsystems (SUNW), Oracle (ORCL) — have fully recast themselves as key agents in the Internet revolution, and each of them has been rejuvenated by the Net's explosive growth. If these companies are not among your holdings, you should consider buying them.
You'll probably notice the lack of dot-com companies in this portfolio. Sure, Internet demand is doubling every 100 days, but seven out of eight dollars spent on the Web involve B2B transactions, according to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. That leaves an increasingly crowded field of dot-com e-tailers — in businesses with low barriers to entry — left to fight over the eighth dollar. Ellen Hancock, CEO of Exodus Communications (EXDS), the leading Web site-hosting firm, has witnessed the trend firsthand. "In 1998, 80% of our business came from the dot-com companies," she reports. "Now we see 44% coming from enterprise clients, and that's growing."
By contrast, the fundamentals for Internet equipment, components and infrastructure software look better all the time. All facets of the telecom system need systematic upgrades to handle extra traffic as businesses and individuals demand more from the Internet. And the building of the Web infrastructure is still in its early stages. Morgan Stanley estimates that, in order to accommodate this year's expected explosion in cable and DSL service, spending to improve both routed networks and the high-speed optical-fiber backbone of the nation's communications system will have to increase 100-fold.
Considerations like these suggest that, for at least the next few years, hardware firms — which provide the guts of new, higher-bandwidth telecommunications systems, whether wired or wireless, local or global — should be among the biggest winners. And software companies whose products clarify, record and enable exchanges between and within organizations stand to do just as well. Unlike with dot-com businesses, the key technologies that underlie hardware and software infrastructure growth are difficult to master, making the barriers to new competition much tougher.
There's just one little problem.
As we mentioned, many of these stocks jumped 250% or more over the past year. If you're just starting to realign your tech portfolio to reflect this shift in power, you'll find that all of the consensus leaders in various hot sectors of technology fetch incredibly high price/earnings ratios. These multiples not only dwarf the stocks in other sectors, they exceed the historically high P/E levels achieved by hot tech stocks.
We've always said the best time to buy tech stocks is during a correction, when multiples temporarily sink. That way you get not only the benefit of future earnings growth (the primary reason, after all, for investing in tech stocks in the first place), but you get an extra stock price boost when multiples return to their previous levels. Of course, it's tough to sit on the sidelines waiting for a correction while hundreds of stocks throw off gains of 250% in a year — the kind of increase that, according to long-term averages, would take a Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fund 12 years to achieve.
For investors, there are essentially two ways to go: Buy firms in a dominant position among their competitors. These companies typically have the most sustainable earnings-growth patterns along with high price multiples. Many of the leading telecom-equipment and Internet-software companies are expected to increase profits annually by 40% or more in the next few years. Growth at that rate would typically lead to stock gains two or three times better than that of the broad market, even without a rising P/E.
Conversely, you can get your exposure to the growth of hot Internet-infrastructure technology by buying up the relatively cheaper stocks in the group. This strategy is often referred to as "growth at a reasonable price." Such companies benefit from earnings growth higher than the market average (an estimated 11%) but don't sport the scary, bubble-like multiples that could collapse — with disastrous results — if investors ever lost faith in the stock market. Some might call these stocks value plays; given their still-significant multiples, we prefer to put the term in quotes.
We chose the stocks in our Ultimate Tech Portfolio after extensive interviews with leading analysts, fund managers and industry executives. We've picked a growth stock in each of eight key technology sectors, and we've also picked an alternative "value" choice in all but one of those sectors. That way you'll have the flexibility to mix and match whatever stock-picking strategy makes more sense with your own investment approach and time horizon.
For our growth picks, we wanted to highlight companies with high earnings-growth rates and a leadership position in their business strong enough to sustain growth, so we looked for dominant market share or control of a leading technology. For our "value" picks, we chose companies with a significant market presence, which makes a turnaround in investor sentiment more likely. We also looked for companies trading at a valuation below their peers' and near or below the overall market — as long as the cause of the lower valuation was temporary or related to misunderstandings about the company's competitive position.
Tech Funds With a Future
Click here for three great ways to play the year's most attractive sectors.
Growth Stocks
**Based on fiscal 2001 earningsCompany Price as of
1/14/00Curr. Price* % Change 3-5 Yr. Est.
EPS GrowthP/E Ratio** Tech Sector PMC-Sierra
(PMCS)82.22 191.00 132% 41% 99 Semiconductors JDS Uniphase
(JDSU)192.19 275.50 43% NA 207 Fiber Optics Cisco Systems
(CSCO)107.56 132.19 23% 30% 85 Networking Applied Materials
(AMAT)135.63 183.44 35% 24% 32 Semiconductor Equipment RF Micro Devices
(RFMD)84.13 156.00 85% 43% 107 Wireless Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg.
(TSM)55.19 60.00 9% NA 56 Contract Manufacturing Veritas Software
(VRTS)146.41 207.81 42% NA 164 Info-mgt. Software Ariba
(ARBA)173.38 299.00 72% 63% N/M B2B Software
Average % Change
55%
* as of 3/2/2000 - Price delayed by at least 20 minutes.
N/M=not meaningful
Source: Zacks Investment Research
**Based on fiscal 2001 earningsCompany Price as of
1/14/00Curr. Price* % Change 3-5 Yr. Est.
EPS GrowthP/E Ratio** Tech Sector LSI Logic
(LSI)36.38 67.38 85% 21% 25 Semiconductors Lucent Technologies
(LU)53.38 70.88 33% 23% 29 Fiber Optics ADC Telecommunications
(ADCT)37.57 45.50 21% 26% 35 Networking Powerwave Technologies
(PWAV)68.47 155.75 127% 41% 41 Wireless Sanmina Corp.
(SANM)97.44 118.69 22% 30% 30 Contract Manufacturing Hyperion Solutions
(HYSL)33.66 56.38 67% 21% 24 Info-mgt. Software Parametric Technology
(PMTC)19.81 28.75 45% 23% 19 B2B Software
Average % Change
57%
* as of 3/2/2000 - Price delayed by at least 20 minutes.
Value stock for semiconductor-equipment sector unavailable
Source: Zacks Investment Research