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Stock picks by the pros
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April 3, 2000: 2:02 p.m. ET
Disney, MetLife, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Intel, Dell, and Net2Phone win mention
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Techs, "old economy" stocks and an insurance company IPO are among the top picks of money managers and analysts.
Here are some comments on the stocks that recent guests on CNNfn are buying, and why.
Robert Armknecht, portfolio manager, Galaxy Equity Growth Fund at Fleet Boston Financial, listed Dell, Tandy, and AOL as his top picks.
"Dell (DELL: Research, Estimates), the company, has been continuing to move ahead, continuing to broaden its product line, particularly into the server area," said Armknecht. "Another fundamental factor with Dell last year was the whole Y2K issue. Today, we think PC sales are very strong.
 Dell is continuing to penetrate the server market, and the stock is ready to start moving forward again, in line with the 30 percent growth rate the company is indicating they can achieve."
"Tandy (TAN: Research, Estimates) was a very popular stock last year, but it fell into disfavor in the latter half of the year. It has recovered somewhat and the company is broadening its penetration into the consumers electronic and telephone area. They are a major seller of handheld phones and cellular phones. They're also broadening into the Internet and providing services there as well. We think Tandy is going to be a good mover."
"AOL (AOL: Research, Estimates) got our attention when they decided to merge with Time Warner. We believe the Time Warner merger is going to be a major benefit for them, and as we see now, with its inclusion in the Fortune 500 today, it's a real company. It has real revenues of over $400 billion," Armknecht pointed out. (Time Warner is the parent company of CNNfn.)
 "At the moment," said Mark Minervini, chief investment strategist, Quantech Research, "what we're seeing is a very rotational market. You can see a lot of Net stocks and dot.com stocks correcting while others are still blasting off. But investors might start looking at rotating some of the money out of some of the big cap tech stocks that made big gains and into some of the stocks like Disney (DIS: Research, Estimates) or maybe even Coca-Cola (KO: Research, Estimates). I think those stocks right now may not be ready to take off. However, a year down the road you're going to have money rotating into there. Investors are starting to nibble on some of the old economy stocks. Some of the money's going to start rotating out of the high-tech sector."
 Net2Phone (NTOP: Research, Estimates) is looking better as an investment, said Don Willmot, executive online editor for PC Magazine, due to the "big leap forward" in service. "Services operate PC-to-phone now. So you can call up Grandma and she doesn't need to have a PC because her phone will ring. The service is much better," said Willmot, "and the fact that many people everyone has full duplex sound cards helps as well. It used to be almost like walkie-talkie, push-to-talk, over and then listen in, but now you can have pretty much a free-flowing conversation and the quality is good enough, especially given the fact that you're basically doing it pretty much almost for free."
 "I don't think Cisco (CSCO: Research, Estimates) is going to disappoint," said Bill Keithler, fund manager, Invesco Technology fund, about the earnings prospects for the first of the so-called "four horsemen" of Nasdaq, "and they will be the last to report, they'll report in May. But I think Intel (INTC: Research, Estimates) is going to report a good number. I think Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) will report an in-line number. And Dell (DELL: Research, Estimates) has already lowered the bar of expectations. I don't think they are going to disappoint [investors] either."
 "There is a pretty good slate of IPOs lined up for next week," said Ray Dirks, Dirks and Co., "but of course not every company is going to take off. There are plenty of people chewing their fingers, because Internet stocks and technology stocks got trashed this week. The biggest offering next week is MetLife (which will trade under the ticker symbol MET), and of course that's in the life insurance field. Those stocks have gone up substantially over the last week or two. A lot of money managers were looking for a safe haven here by the end of the quarter, so about three weeks ago the insurance stocks started up sharply, as did many bank stocks and some of the other stocks that had not really moved this year. And so MetLife may come out as a pretty substantial, positive new issue. C.S. First Boston and Goldman Sachs are the two lead managers behind this IPO.
"One out of every 11 households owns a MetLife policy," Dirks pointed out, "so it's well known, it's a big brand name. But the main thing is, the stock is coming out so cheaply. It's only selling at around $14, if you take the middle of the range. And yet they're projecting growth of 15 percent per year in earnings per share."
The views presented here are solely those of the analysts quoted. They do not represent the opinions of CNNfn on whether to buy or sell shares of a particular stock. 
--Compiled by Tatiana D. Helenius and Parija Bhatnagar
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