The Three New Rules for Tech-Stock Investing

And second, Statoil(STO Quote), one of the few national oil companies to trade publicly, owns a huge chunk of the continental shelf. (Well, actually Norway does, and Norway owns 70% of Statoil.) And it's about to own even more. The U.S. Geological Survey, the source of some of the more optimistic projections on global oil reserves, estimates that 25% of the world's undiscovered oil lies in the lands and seas around the Arctic Circle.

Believers in global warming might note that exploration in these areas is going to get easier, but even global-warming skeptics can be sure that as push comes to shove -- and Statoil is facing a big shove because it is pumping oil from existing reserves faster than it is finding new oil -- oil companies will drill in these areas. It will take a while for Norway and Russia to sort out who owns what part of the continental shelf in their region, but sort it out they will. And drill Statoil must.

3. Growing profit margins live. All the old-technology sector rules seem to apply. For a company such as Tenaris(TS Quote), for example, adding more and more technology to its steel pipes for oil and gas wells increases the profit margins on the pipe, which in turn gives Tenaris the cash to buy competitors such as Maverick and to acquire Hydril(HYDL Quote) and its pressure-control technology, which will add even more value to Tenaris' pipes and increase margins even more.

Or for a company such as Johnson Controls(JCI Quote), where growing scale is leading to growing margins in its building-efficiency business. The company is combining its expertise in heating and cooling systems (acquired when it bought York) with its knowledge of systems control to move into the new business of providing outsourced energy management for other companies' buildings.

Deutsche Bank projects that margins in the business will grow by 2 percentage points from 2007 to 2009. Each time the company adds a client, of course, it is better able to cut its costs for providing energy to its customers, which increases the savings it can deliver, which increases its customer base. And all that with higher margins, too.

I realize these five stocks -- Color Kinetics, Transocean, Statoil, Tenaris and Johnson Controls -- aren't from the same family as the great technology stocks of the 1990s. But they fit the old rules well. And, after all, profits and technology are where you find them.

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