Welcome to week 8 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

$16.38

(26.3%)

Harris & Harris

$6.22

$7.58

21.9%

IBM (NYSE:IBM)

$129.05

$119.42

(7.5%)

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL)

$22.75

$20.62

(9.4%)

Taiwan Semiconductor

$10.34

$9.25

(10.5%)

Average Return

--

--

(6.36%)

S&P 500 SPDR (AMEX:SPY)

$126.73

$120.85

(4.64%)

Difference

--

--

(1.72%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance. Recent price as of 9/26/2008.

Uh-oh, I've lost almost a half-point over the past 10 days. Should I blame a far-from-perfect $700 billion government bailout? Did the FDIC-brokered fire sale of Washington Mutual's banking assets to JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) torpedo my stocks? Not likely; these are underleveraged firms, blessed with balance sheets that most banks would envy.

Carnage could plague the tech sector for weeks or even months. 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 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:

  • Last week, Oracle entered the hardware business with a database appliance. This isn't as new an idea as it seems. But it is interesting: Low-cost, self-contained appliances can add big value to IT managers with specific needs.
  • Foolish colleague Dave Mock did an interesting valuation study of Taiwan Semiconductor. It's worth a read if, like me, you think its shares are cheap.

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

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