Forum Archive Index - December 1999

["Mark Hubbard" <mhubbard@es.co.nz>]

I haven't got a lot of time to wade into this very interesting debate, but
here's my pennys worth.

I too consider myself to be a value investor - my main NZ shareholdings
currently are: Warehouse, Ryman, Restaurant Brands, Fernz (well, sort of NZ)
+ AMP Office Trust and Kiwi Income Property Fund form the property portion
of my NZ portfolio (if there is an undervalued stock on the NZSE based on
likely future earnings, it must be AMP Office Trust). Up until about a month
ago, I had always kept away from techs, as I thought, and still do, that
many are way overvalued. I use a discounted earnings approach to share
valuation (in combination with an eye to p/e's - thus you can imagine the
obvious problems when trying to value a tech.

However, the tech gains have just been too attractive, and I have decided
that a small, note I said small, portion of my portfolio should be in techs.
Because I have problems with valuations, however, I have decided to leave
this portion of my portfolio to the experts and so have invested in techs
through the UK Investment Trust, Finsbury Technology (I would also prefer my
tech investment overseas, rather than in NZ). I have been in Finsbury for
three weeks, and this morning my returns in this fund have just hit 30% (in
three weeks). For the last three years this fund has consistently returned
over 100%. At this rate, one could logically say who cares if the Nasdaq
falls 50% (which certainly would be a crash), after these returns, I'll
still probably be up.

Finally, I took another punt and managed to get a minimum allocation in
Chrome Global, half of which I sold down yesterday morning for .63c (a 106%
return).

I guess my point for value investors is, yes, tech stocks are 'generally'
overvalued and therefore should only be a small part of your overall
investments - however, they should still be in there somewhere surely.
Buffet is very good, and basically wise - but God he is not.

Regards


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To remove yourself from this list, email sharechat-request@sharechat.co.nz
with "unsubscribe" in the body of the message, or use the unsubscription
form at http://www.sharechat.co.nz/forum.html.