There was an interesting story yesterday in the Texas Journal of the Wall Street Journal. Since the WSJ is copyrighted, I'll just paraphrase some of the gist of the story.

Titled "Fund Manager Makes Y2K Computer Bug a Personal Crusade," the story details plans that Barry Kitt is making. Kitt is the manager of the Pinnacle Fund, a small Plano hedge fund specializing in finding "undiscovered" small-capitalization stocks.

Since March, however, when stocks accounted for 85 percent of Pinnacle's holdings, Kitt has reduced his equity exposure to 30 percent with the rest held in cash. His goal for the fund, which has assets of $36 million, is to be 80 percent cash by the end of the year.

All this to prepare himself for what he believes to be the inevitable stock market crash caused by Y2K. He further believes that investors soon will become so anxious about Y2K that they will begin pulling their money out of the market en masse.

I suspect that one of the reasons the WSJ picked Mr. Kitt is his track record. He is described as a first-rate stock picker. Over the last five years, Pinnacle has shown average annual returns of almost 27 percent. His fund through Aug. 5 is up 42 percent for the year.

Kitt's main concern is the global economy. He foresees a row of foreign countries' economies tanking, taking the United States down with it.

He also expects a 2,000 to 3,000 point drop in the Dow which he says is overvalued and in the process of forming an asset bubble.

Because the market is facing what he called a certain event with the potential to be a world cataclysmic event, he feels the market is going to tank big time.

I don't know the URL for the WSJ, but, in any case, it's a subscription site.

Awareness is growing, if slowly.

-- Vic (Rdrunner@internetwork.net), August 12, 1999

Answers

he's right, and I'm part of the awareness program in Texas. It is up to us to make sure all of us PC owners and users are ready for the 2000 crunch.. This is not a Joke!! the current issue is that most fixes, i.e. Norton are not fixing all three clocks, instead they are waiting for the ball to drop and than go back to their clients and say ooops, we didn't think that 3rd clock (called the CMOS) would have any effect. I'm not trying to slander them, but simply they arn't helping this world wide issue. We've found a very comprehensive diagnostic and fix that does handle all hardware problems. Here is a link to try a free download and test. www.ttechnology.com/y2ktimebomb

-- IT'S UP TO uS (ecotton@ttechnology.com), August 12, 1999.