Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
be increasingly important throughout the twenty-first century, and
you can’t afford to ignore them.”
Like Papp, Stovall was slow to grab on to this concept, partly because
he noticed that his colleagues who invested in some of the upstart
technology concerns had most of their gains wiped out by offsetting
losses. “That was when technology was evolving out of its
infancy and there were a lot of fly-by-night companies out there,”
he shares. “Now that technology is unquestionably the biggest and
most important business in the world, you can’t help but take it seriously.
Some older investment professionals don’t see it that way. They
sit back and say, ‘I don’t understand technology so I’ll invest in
something else.’ I suppose there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with
that, but, as for me, I can’t just sit here and let 30 percent of the
economy blow right by me without getting involved.”
In accordance with his philosophy of keeping risk to a minimum,
Stovall prefers to own the large blue-chip technology operations, as
opposed to some of the recent start-ups. “However, when I get more
confidence in myself and the industry in general, whichever comes
first, I’m sure I will branch out into several of the smaller names as
well,” he says. Stovall is growing increasingly more accustomed to
the sector, especially since he now uses computers regularly to manage
his own investment practice.
A CHANGE IN PHILOSOPHY
Globalization and technology now form the primary foundation
of Roy Papp’s entire investment philosophy and process. “Because
the rate of change is so much faster than it has been historically, I
think the impact of these two factors on our society will be greater
than electricity was in 1900 or the railroads were in the late 1800s,”
he predicts. “Our changes today are faster and more dramatic. They’re
the two driving forces of everything. Keeping with the globalization
theme, when you go back to the beginning of western civilization,
we went through Egypt, Crete, Greece, and Rome. But when Marco
Polo finally got to China, he realized it was miles ahead in everything,
from printing to gun powder. In the 1700s, the center of civilization
and most productive economic returns moved from China to Holland,
then back to England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
the twentieth century, it came to the North Americas. In the twenty-
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