Bet on the Tortoise.com.

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF
• Position: Brief Article - Column

IF IT SOUNDS TO GOOD TO BE TRUE.COM, IT IS.COM

Call me old fashioned, but I am conservative by nature. Not backward, mind you, just conservative. I readily embrace new technologies and new ideas, and I do my best to understand and use them, but I don't jump, I observe and learn.

The whole dot.com thing is a case in point. The Internet has changed my life, and I know more about it, use it more, and foster its possibilities more than anyone else I know who is my age or older. I am, as it were, "wired."

But the whole time I have been observing this e-commerce phenomenon, I have been thinking about the old "Tortoise and the Hare" parable that, I have come to realize many times in my adult life, made quite an impression on me during bedtime stories when I was a toddler. It is the lesson that the race doesn't always go to the swift that has always mollified me as I sometimes have frustratingly fought my inclination to rush right in. That and the old song about what fools do.

Although, with e-commerce, it might be the Tortoise and the Hare meets Charlotte's Web. The Hare hasn't napped with confidence, but rather confidently has attacked the spider's creation without appreciating its complexity. In any case, the Tortoise is still the favorite.

As I write this, the NASDAQ -- the palace of the "new economy" -- has dropped more than 16% since the first of the year, and the "old economy" standard -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average -- is soaring. Of course, that could all change in a day or two, but I think in the long run -- over the course of the race -- the Dow and its Tortoise companies will win the race.

Oh sure, I would like to invest a couple thousand in some dot.com entity's IPO, have it go public and through the roof, and make a fortune. I would like to have the money of some of these young guys with stock options who are retiring at age 28 with several million dollars. But if it happened to me I would sell the dot.com stock, pay the tax, and invest the remainder in the old, staid so-called "blue-chip" companies, where quarterly performance may lag, but underlying value will never sag. I want to own equities...