2/29/2000
https://www.thestreet.com/story/891820/1/the-winners-of-the-…
"You want winners? You want me to put my Cramer Berkowitz hedge fund hat on and
just discuss what my fund is buying today to try to make money tomorrow and the next
day and the next? You want my top 10 stocks for who is going to make it in the New
World? You know what? I am going to give them to you. Right here. Right now.
OK. Here goes. Write them down – no handouts here!: 724 Solutions ( SVNX),
Ariba ( ARBA), Digital Island ( ISLD), Exodus ( EXDS), InfoSpace.com ( INSP),
Inktomi ( INKT), Mercury Interactive ( MERQ), Sonera ( SNRA), VeriSign ( VRSN)
and Veritas Software ( VRTS).
We are buying some of every one of these this morning as I give this speech. We buy
them every day, particularly if they are down, which, no surprise given what they do,
is very rare. And we will keep doing so until this period is over – and it is very far
from ending. Heck, people are just learning these stories on Wall Street, and the more
they come to learn, the more they love and own! Most of these companies don’t even
have earnings per share, so we won’t have to be constrained by that methodology for
quarters to come.
There, now that that’s done with, can we talk about the methodology that produced those
top 10 so that you can understand how, in a universe of a gazillion stocks, we arrived
at those, so you too can figure it out? I hope we can because I have another 10 and
still another 10 and another. They all do the same thing: They make the Web faster,
cheaper, better and easier to access anywhere, anytime. They allow you to get on the Web
securely anywhere in the world. They make the Web economy the only economy that matters.
That’s all they do.
We try to own every one of them. Every single one. And if I had my druthers, I wouldn’t
own any other stocks in the year 2000. Because these are the only ones worth owning right
now in this extremely difficult, extremely narrow stock market. They are the only ones
that are going higher consistently in good days and bad. I love every one of them, just
as I loathe the rest of the stock universe.
How did this stock market get like this, to where the only people who can make a dime
in it are the people who are interested in the most arcane subject, the moving of data
from one space to another, via strange new machines and software? How did it get to the
point where nothing else matters, most particularly the 90% of the stock market I have
studied for the last 20 years? How did all of that knowledge become totally irrelevant
and the only stocks that work are the stocks of companies that didn’t exist five years
ago and came public in the last two or three years?
Let’s start with the world in the early 21st century, a world where capital is abundant
for a chosen few and nonexistent for just about everybody else. It is a world where
the whole of Wall Street and Silicon Valley is at your fingertips if you are creating
the infrastructure for the New Economy, and a world where neither Wall Street nor
Silicon Valley could give a darn about you if you are using that infrastructure.
Or in other words, we don’t care if General Motors ( GM) and Ford ( F) are going with
Oracle ( ORCL) or with i2 ( ITWO) for their new parts procurement process. We don’t
want to own GM or Ford on any occasion. In fact, we would rather own the loser in
that tech bake-off than the winner in nontech, because in this new world, there is so
much business to be done for the i2s and the Oracles that the capital will remain
plentiful for them, win or lose a particular piece of business.
Just yesterday I found myself wishing I had bought i2 when it lost out to Oracle for
the giant business-to-business contract for the Big Three automakers. Others had the
same idea because i2, the loser Friday, was up much more Monday than GM and Ford could
be this year. i2 can own the world because the company with the access to cheap capital
always wins. And the companies with no access have to lose."
The link below shows how those stocks performed after Cramer recommended them:
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2015/6/22/saupload_A…
