These Tech Stocks Will Make Me Rich

• Email
• Share
• Print

Welcome to week 13 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	$13.79	(37.9%)
Harris & Harris	$6.22	$4.58	(26.4%)
IBM (NYSE: IBM)	$129.05	$85.15	(34.0%)
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)	$22.75	$16.85	(25.9%)
Taiwan Semiconductor	$10.34	$7.37	(28.7%)
Average return	--	--	(30.58%)
S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX: SPY)	$126.73	$90.86	(28.30%)
Difference	--	--	(2.28%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance as of Nov. 6, 2008.

At least my tech portfolio took a week to backslide 6%. The S&P 500 fell 10% over two days, Wednesday and Thursday. Some non-tech decliners during that time included The Blackstone Group, down around 16%.

Of course, high tech has its losers, too. CEO Jerry Yang, fresh off an embarrassing breakup with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), now says he wants Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) to tie the knot with Mr. Softy.

So be it. Top investors look to invest in businesses with sustainable, long-term advantages, and in doing so, produce superior returns -- like when David Gardner produced a decade of 20% returns, annualized, by buying and holding the likes of Amazon.com (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.

Checkup time!
Now, let's move on to the rest of today's update:

• Foolish colleague Dave Mock this week revealed why, for Internet investors, Akamai is a dream stock.
• IBM keeps working with a disruptive growth company.
• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison could become a margin call victim.

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

Get your clicks with more techie Foolishness:

• Why not take a page from this tech winner's playbook?
• Google wins by air, land, and sea.
• Broken-home dot-coms could fix your portfolio.