Just another amusing article I came across. Cheapest in 20 years, ha, after most stocks being up over 200-500% since bottoming in 2008 this guy is screaming that they are still the cheapest in 20 years, I wonder how cheap they were in early 2008 when everything was in collapse mode. Wow are people just crazy about equities right now, no one wanted to touch the market just 2 years ago when it was selling off continuously now these money managers are screaming buy, buy tech stocks at their "CHEAPEST" level in 20 years. Tech Stocks at 'Cheapest' in 20 Years: Fund Manager Published: Tuesday, 12 Oct 2010 | 3:26 PM ET Text Size By: Reuters Technology stocks are at their cheapest in 20 years and the weaker dollar will likely benefit the entire sector, hedge fund industry pioneer Lee Ainslie said on Tuesday. Ainslie, whose Maverick Capital Management oversees $11.4 billion in assets, said a pool of value tech stocks including Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machine, Intel, and Microsoft provide a high free-cash-flow yield of 12 percent this year and 13 percent in 2011. Maverick, one of the world's biggest hedge funds which is located in Dallas and New York, had about a third of its stock portfolio invested in technology companies â more than any other sector â at the end of June, according to regulatory filings. Ainslie, speaking at the annual Value Investing Congress in New York, said tech stocks are attractive also because of the weaker dollar, which can help U.S. companies that export. Many U.S. tech companies earn half or more of their revenues overseas. "The weak dollar is helpful for technology companies," he said. Ainslie said technology companies are now holding more cash on their balance sheets than they have since the 1950s. "This is especially true for technology companies," he said. "It is sitting there and not being used. "We want to make sure these companies are using cash in productive ways like buybacks, dividend payments or acquisitions." He worried that technology companies are not spending enough on capital expenditures. He also said innovations are more important than elasticity. "Most people can't name the processor running their iPads," he added. Ainslie said fundamentals have not played an important role in stocks this year against the backdrop of aggressive monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve. Similar to the phenomenon last year, the lowest quality stocks, many of which carry so-called "junk" credit ratings, have been the best performers in 2010.
I guess "Lee Ainslie" is ignoring the growing and engorging Goodwill on the balance sheet, the dilution of stock by printing shares for insiders only to be bought back using the free cashflow giving insiders a backdoor way of screwing over shareholders. In general most tech-stocks are poor long term investments.
None of your points addressed what he said. If you want to disagree with him, you need to show how they are expensive. And the valuation has nothing to do with what the stock was doing 1 or 2 years ago (or what it's doing today). All he said was that they are on high earnings yields. Just post the accounts to disprove it, it's pretty simple if you are right, after all.