If you had money to invest in tech stock, which would you choose? | Hacker News Reader

If you had money to invest in tech stock, which would you choose?

6 pointsandrewtbham22 comments

I'd choose a tech stock with less than $1b in market capital and little analyst coverage. Anything larger will have been picked apart by the professionals doing this for a living. It'd probably take a few hours of poring through SEC filings and studying the relevant technology to figure out whether it's viable. It probably wouldn't be a name that's mentioned on HN or Slashdot.

Thats popular opinion but for example I bought apple at 240 at a good rate of leverage and it is sitting pretty behind a trailing stop at the moment.... if you belive in the fundementals, follow the industry (i.e. invest in what you know) no reason why you cannot get good returns with large cap stocks

What do you mean by "good rate of leverage"? You traded on margin at a low interest rate?

I meant because it is a CFD I am getting 25 / 1 exposure. IG markets interest is very low also though

I must agree with this method. There is no substitute for researching companies. I'd filter a bunch of 10k's and look for abnormalities etc.. You can start with the typical top down approach - decide what your view is on the economy, pick an industry you think is poised to do well or badly in those circumstances, start filtering firms that fit in with your assumptions. Look for the drivers of revenues and costs for these firms and see if you can find anything that is 'abnormal' and make a play based on those...

Leveraged bets at the moment personally: Apple - great company, great management, rosy future Google - dominant market share, interesting new products expected ARM and Qualycomm - processors for virtually all smart phones and tablets Was annoyed I missed some of the big security M&A's McAffee at al - so owning Juniper, Symantec and Checkpoint short term in case it continues Galaxy - lithium Newcrest - Gold Corning - gorilla glass for smartphones

Would love to hear HN's readers thoughts the above, loving my trailing stops at the moment :)

i'm bearish on google... dominant market share = low growth. they used to be taking share from others, mostly yahoo. now they are loosing share to bing. new products? they have had a string of duds. wave, buzz, etc. furthermore they are loosing talent to facebook. i don't see it.

I'm playing the gold rush in multiple ways.

1) Owning physical gold (and silver).

2) Buying shares of gold and silver mining stocks.

3) Buying the mining stocks on the Toronto exchange, in Canadian dollars, so as the USD continues it's decent my investment also appreciates through the better exchange rate.

Thoughts?

Do you have a good story on why you believe that gold will keep going up for while? I can think of one maybe the US currency will continue to decline and the world will change to a basket of currencies backed by gold... Personally I am going long on a gold company just to benefit in the laging effect of high gold prices on the earnings of these companies... other than that I have no real story on why gold keeps going up and more importantly when/if it will peak and take a major fall Is owning physical gold and silver because you think the US will colapse like the roman empire and you want some quick currency to escape?... aka Peter Shiff ? (http://amzn.to/bTVMIj)

I think you're hitting on some of the key points.

The Fed is continuing it's policy of monetary expansion. Most major central banks around the world are doing the same. US treasury debt is in a massive bubble. The Fed is propping it up daily. Money won't find safe haven in any fiat currency and have nowhere to go but gold to preserve wealth. Good ol' Greenspan said as much in a recent announcement he made. He advises central planners to stock up on gold.

A boring diversified combination of ETFs?

Rather than looking for the next big thing, try to look for what the next big thing is dependent on. There could be ten companies trying to build a better electric vehicle battery, but they're all going to have to get their lithium from somewhere.

good point... do you have a good lithium play?

Galaxy if you want an Australian stock, Western Lithium if you want a US stock

GOOG: http://www.google.ca/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GOOG

Their stock is pretty much invincible.

Their stock is pretty much invincible.

When people say things like this you know the stock has about hit it's peak and nowhere to go but down. Just watch :)

Agree, GOOG is just one scrappy startup away from irrelevance. The company is locked in a Red Queen race with the very content spammers it subsidizes, and its search results are only incrementally better than they were in 1999. Google's income is heavily leveraged on its search traffic, and if/when that collapses the company will go with it.

Nvidia. Tegra platform will totally dominate the mobile chip market in 2011. Most of the tech companies have already partnered with them to get their chip.

Are you sure that you understand this ahead of the rest of the market? How do you know this positive outlook isn't already built into the price?

If expectations are high, any trip-up by NVDA or its current partners could send it tumbling.

My point is that it's not enough to know a company is doing well. To make money off the stock, you need to know it _before everyone else does_.

MSFT Their free cash flow last year was $22 bn and their enterprise value is $177bn, which gives EV/FCF of slightly above 8.

Not VMWare, it has a record P/E.

Amazon?

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