NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Wanna buy a used paradigm, for cheap?
You can, quite literally. Pop on over to Amazon.com, where (courtesy of the online retailer's Marketplace program) you can find several dozen used copies of George Gilder's "Telecosm" for just a few bucks.
Much -- it goes without saying -- like the once high-priced stocks Gilder wrote about so breathlessly in the book itself.
In September of 2000, when Gilder published his long-awaited treatise, investors rushed to scoop it up in search of knowledge about the arcane details of optical networking -- the means of transmitting information at super-fast speeds.
Gilder, an eccentric economist, right-wing polemicist, and regular contributor to Forbes, had earned himself something of a reputation as a high-tech guru and a fiber-optic evangelist. The book promised readers access to the precious thoughts contained in Gilder's $295 a year newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report.
The book's sub-title, "How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World," captured both the innocence and fervor of the book itself. But those looking for stock picks didn't get much of a bargain.
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GILDER'S FALLEN "STARS"
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Consider, for example, the companies Gilder highlighted as the "nine stars of the telecosm." Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, the best performers of the bunch, have each lost roughly a third of their value. Lucent and Broadcom are both down more than 80 percent.
And that's the good news. The other "stars," Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications, Nortel, Avanex, and JDS Uniphase, are all down more than 90 percent.
Granted, newsletter subscribers were hip to some of these names long before the rest of the crowd. Gilder, after all, was talking up Qualcomm way back in 1996; even after falling back from its highs in 1999 the stock is still up more than 800 percent from when Gilder first mentioned it. (Which ain't bad!)
So is it fair to pick on Gilder's picks? Gilder, after all, claims not to be a stock picker, saying he's interested only in making sense of "the ascendant technologies" in what he calls the "Gilder Paradigm."
But that's a tad disingenuous. Few subscribe to a $295 newsletter out of idle intellectual curiosity. And Gilder's Web site plugs his alleged stock picking genius with all the subtlety of a carnival barker. "It's not too late to grow very rich on technology," one tout proclaims.
"Yes, the Nasdaq has punished a lot of good technology stocks. But with George Gilder's help [you can] discover the companies that will play leading roles in the bandwidth revolution and watch their stock prices soar." Elsewhere on the site, an enthusiastic subscriber known only as DD happily reports that "my first trade will pay for my $295 subscription many, many times over."
I can only assume the quote is a relic from an earlier, more innocent age. These days, if you'll pardon the atrocious pun, I'm not sure Gilder's paradigm is worth a nickel.
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