My Tech Portfolio Will Crush the Market

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Welcome to Week Seven 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	$17.00	(23.5%)
Harris & Harris (Nasdaq: TINY)	$6.22	$8.00	28.6%
IBM (NYSE: IBM)	$129.05	$111.47	(13.6%)
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)	$22.75	$18.75	(17.6%)
Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM)	$10.34	$9.37	(9.4%)
AVERAGE RETURN	--	--	(7.10%)
S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX: SPY)	$126.73	$119.37	(5.81%)
DIFFERENCE	--	--	(1.29%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

Can you believe it? In a week where Lehman Brothers failed, AIG needed a bailout, and Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, my tech portfolio was up. And not only up -- it vastly outperformed the S&P 500.

Could tech be a safe haven? I'm not sure I'd go that far. But we Rule Breakers investors have seen this sort of carnage before, and we know that we'll see it again. All I can do is be patient and take comfort in knowing that it's durable gains that matter most -- like when David Gardner produced a decade of 20% returns by buying and holding the likes of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay in the real-money Rule Breaker portfolio, or when 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.

This week's checkup
Now, let's move on to the rest of this week's update:

• Akamai saw Amazon invade its market this week, but the consequences are very unlikely to be as dire as investors appear to think. Amazon won't offer as many features as Akamai does, nor will it support streaming, industry watcher Dan Rayburn reports.
• Oracle last night reported outstanding fiscal-first quarter results. Revenue improved 18%, while per-share GAAP earnings rose 28%. Nice.

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

Get your clicks with more techie Foolishness:

• Did Lehman just kill tech?
• More brains for the Big G.
• How big might this tech business be?