Thread by @FrederikNeckar

Bill Miller wrote about value investing and tech in 1999. Wild that we had the debate all over again a decade+ later

"Many value investors have chosen to ignore technology companies despite ... the ability to create substantial, long-lasting shareholder wealth." @B3_MillerValue

Reasons typically given: difficult to understand, rapid change, too expensive.
"All of these reasons are weak."

"Although technology changes reasonably rapidly, it doesn't follow that such change is random or unpredictable."

"If technology is difficult, it is not incomprehensible. Investors who rule out the largest sector of the market, and the most important driver of economic growth and progress, because it takes work to figure it out have little to cavil about when others get the rewards."

"Technology companies often create change and instability in other unrelated businesses."
"Ignoring technology often leads to making bad investment decisions by not understanding the risks."

-> Berkshire's World Books

"Traditional metrics, when they work at all, work best with traditional businesses. The value of these tools is usually a function of the historical data ... This is absent from most Internet businesses, leaving the value investor at an apparent disadvantage"

"It is true that some of the best technology companies have rarely looked attractive on traditional valuation methods, but that speaks more to the weakness of those methods than to the fundamental risk-reward relationships of those businesses."

This was the 1997 Cisco pitch Miller referred to

"One type of value investor requires the authority of the past in order to make a bet on the future. They wish to avoid inevitable errors...

Avoiding the analysis of possible futures, their probabilities and expected payoffs, may constitute the greatest error of all."