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Buy, sell or hold: The outlook for technology stocks

Last week I went to the Churchill Club panel discussion, "Buy, Sell or Hold: The Outlook for Technology Stocks," at Ricky's Hyatt in Palo Alto. The A-list tech investor panelists were Matt L’Heureux of Goldman Sachs, Roger McNamee of Integral Capital Partners and Michael Murphy of Murphy Investment Management.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

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Last week I went to the Churchill Club panel discussion, "Buy, Sell or Hold: The Outlook for Technology Stocks," at Ricky's Hyatt in Palo Alto. PodcastThe A-list tech investor panelists were Matt L’Heureux of Goldman Sachs, Roger McNamee of Integral Capital Partners and Michael Murphy of Murphy Investment Management. Moderator Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief for CNBC, and audience tried to extract sage advice from the panelists nearly 90 minutes The panel discussed what’s in store for technology stocks in the next 12 to 18 months and was asked to identify areas of opportunities to make some money in the market. You can hear what they had to say in our audio MP3 download/Podcast of the complete event.

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From left: Jim Goldman, Matt L'Heureux, Roger McNamee, Michael Murphy

I would say that caution was expressed as a theme for the coming months. As a backdrop, the day of the event IBM's profit fell short of expectations. According to Murphy, today's market is volatile and fairly trendless, and 2006 is looking soft. Enterprise-oriented companies aren't looking for the next big thing that will save them, L’Heureux said. Instead they are figuring out how to take cost out of themselves and for their customers, and consolidating platforms in more profitable ways, which he said is a fundamental change for Silicon Valley. The consumer side, on the other hand, is attracting lots of investment.

Other nuggets you'll hear in the audio capture of the event: the semiconductor industry is ripe for consoliation, what investors don't get about the Symantec/Veritas marriage, what's next for Siebel, what are some of the companies that the panelists have positions in, Moore's Law is good until computers have the neural processing power of a human being, the iPod is the most important consumer brand, utility computing is important but in an early stage, Sun is a question mark, the SunGard leveraged buyout is unique phenomenon, the days of option shopping are over, not all big companies are brain dead, think healthcare, stay bullish on Google.

You can listen to my pre-event audio interview with Roger McNamee here...

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