My Tech Portfolio Will Crush the Market

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Welcome to week 5 of my stock-picking throwdown with Mr. Market. Let's get right to the numbers:

Company	Starting Price	Recent Price	Total Return
Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM)	$22.23	$19.64	(11.7%)
Harris & Harris (Nasdaq: TINY)	$6.22	$7.70	23.8%
IBM (NYSE: IBM)	$129.05	$115.00	(10.9%)
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)	$22.75	$19.93	(12.4%)
Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM)	$10.34	$8.65	(16.3%)
AVERAGE RETURN	--	--	(5.50%)
S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX: SPY)	$126.73	$124.03	(2.13%)
DIFFERENCE	--	--	(3.37%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

Ouch. The Wall Street Panic of 2008 has kicked my tech portfolio where it hurts. The good news? We Motley Fool Rule Breakers investors have seen this sort of carnage before.

Patience paid then and it'll pay now, because it's durable gains that matter most -- like when Fool co-founder David Gardner produced a decade of 20% returns by buying and holding the likes of Amazon.com and eBay in the real-money Rule Breaker portfolio, or when Fool co-founder Tom Gardner selected a "simpleton portfolio" to hold for a decade, with market-crushing results. I think these five tech stocks will produce plenty of durable gains. (They'd better. Combined, Akamai, Harris & Harris, IBM, Oracle, and Taiwan Semiconductor account for roughly one-quarter of our portfolio's current value.)

This week's checkup
If there's one thing I've learned in a decade of investing, it's that those who pursue long-term returns do best when they closely watch the companies they commit capital to. It's with that spirit in mind that we check in weekly with my top techies. This week's update:

• IBM is winning the server war, outgaining price-cutter Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) in the quest for market share. I'm biased, of course, but I believe this is the result of Big Blue successfully linking software and services with its server lineup.
• Oracle acquired ClearApp, a start-up that specializes in managing the tangled code behind service-oriented architectures. The database king also regained top technologist Richard Sarwal from VMware (NYSE: VMW), nine months after his leaving for the virtualization pioneer.

There's your checkup. See you back here next week for more tech-stock talk.

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