These Tech Stocks Will Make Me Rich

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

Company	Starting Price	Recent Price	Total Return
Akamai	$22.23	$14.85	(33.2%)
Harris & Harris (Nasdaq: TINY)	$6.22	$5.76	(7.4%)
IBM	$129.05	$103.44	(19.8%)
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)	$22.75	$19.48	(14.4%)
Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM)	$10.34	$8.45	(18.3%)
AVERAGE RETURN	--	--	(18.42%)
S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX: SPY)	$126.73	$110.34	(12.93%)
DIFFERENCE	--	--	(5.49%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

My technology portfolio's getting slashed to ribbons. Not even Oracle, king of the market for critical database technology, is safe. Earlier today, peer SAP (NYSE: SAP) copped to slowing growth in its core business. Investors responded by dumping Oracle, which is down more than 7% as I write.

Fear is everywhere, a $700 billion-cum-$810 billion bailout plan notwithstanding.

Listening to angry music is helping me cope some, but honestly, the best solution would be to double-down on my best stock ideas. That's how top investors generate superior returns -- like when David Gardner produced a decade of 20% returns by buying and holding the likes of Amazon.com and eBay (Nasdaq: 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:

• Foolish colleague Dave Mock recently covered both the bull and bear case for Akamai. Take a look if you've had the stock on your watch list.
• IBM is facing skepticism from analysts, who say that the financial crisis will cost Big Blue deals and put the squeeze on earnings in the current quarter. Maybe so, but the stock is still far cheaper than most investors think.

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

Get your clicks with more techie Foolishness:

• iRobot (Nasdaq: IRBT) is a terminator.
• Can we please stop trying to kill Steve Jobs?
• Buy shares of Apple instead.