Ain't No Stopping Them Now...Da-Da Da-DA

YHOO and GOOG. GOOG and YHOO... Who can afford not having them in their portfolios... Perhaps this is why the performance chasers are still loading up on them. Only a week ago, I recommended owning both (even at the *then* elevated levels -- $35 for YHOO and $340 for GOOG), with YHOO being "the cheaper one" if such a thing even made any sense at the time. What makes sense now though is that, with GOOG trading above $380, it has become a trading sell, which we traders like to "loosely translate" as "if you own it, brother, sell a substantial portion of it to buy it lower or just buy something else; and if you don't, well... definitely don't buy it here!". YHOO at $38 is still much cheaper than GOOG at $380 (and no, the extra 0 has nothing to do with it -- I am just talking fundamentals!).

Otherwise, as a Halloween afterthought, I propose changing DELL's ticker symbol to DETH, because the stock's performance reminds me of the inexorable force of gravity (the one which one discovers when one jumps off an impossibly high cliff) which leads to inevitable...er... death. Is DELL "cheap" here, below $30, at $29 or so? Yes, but not "cheap enough". The growth expectations for this company have to be readjusted (downward, and make it several notches while you are at it!) -- this is no longer the same DELL that was the darling of tech enthusiasts of the 90s. The new DELL is GOOG -- the money-making model of the service-driven U.S. economy which everyone craves for themselves, and which nobody [as of yet] has figured out how to compete with. But no company can grow forever. MSFT is today a "value" stock. I already suggested that YHOO may be transforming itself into a similar phenomenon. GOOG, on the other hand, is still a growth stock, but not at any price. 5 years from now, we may be talking about GOOG in the same way we are talking about MSFT now -- big and strong and powerful, but no longer a growth name. It all depends on the time horizon perspective. As Keynes once said, in the long run, we are all dead. I bet Michael (as in Michael Dell) is thinking along similar lines today.