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My business is a business of humility. Every day, things happen in the business world that force me to reexamine my positions and reach different conclusions. I live in a pressure cooker where conditions change constantly. If they didn't, this job would be a cake walk. I would never have to sweat or worry or argue or shake with fear or anger because something didn't happen as I thought it would.

Two positions, two now-in-flux positions, demonstrate this rapidly changing dynamic more than any I have seen in some time: AT&T (T:NYSE - news - boards) and Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - boards). I had been saving discussion of both of these for last night's RealMoney.com chat, because I thought I would get to answer in real time how my thinking has been changing on these two very important positions. But the chat got cancelled because of technical difficulties on the provider end, and so now I will address the issues in this column.

In one of my first pieces for Smart Money a decade ago, I wrote that AT&T was ascending and IBM (IBM:NYSE - news - boards) was about to collapse. I said you should go long AT&T, which was in the 30s, and short IBM, which was in the hundreds, and cover when they met. It was one of the best calls I ever made and everybody who played it was handsomely rewarded.

After the Gerstner hire at IBM, I have come to love the company again and think that its stock price is undervalued. We own it now. But AT&T has been a different story. We got long AT&T because we liked Michael Armstrong's record. Like George Fischer when he came to Kodak (EK:NYSE), the honeymoon ended in a blazing fashion that amounted to stock arson. Armstrong ruined the balance sheet and brought AT&T low in a strategy that can be broadly summarized as wanting sole access to the information pipe into your home.

Now the stock is at 31, cut in half by what looks like a series of botched acquisitions and revolving-door managers. The stock has come to personify the big equity you can't own because it disappoints and disappoints and disappoints. A week ago I wrote that perhaps, at last, the disappointment is "in" the stock and we were beginning to buy it again after taking what amounted to be brutal losses at the beginning of the year.

We did so because we thought the Deutsche Telecom (DT:NYSE - news - boards) purchase of VoiceStream Wireless (VSTR:Nasdaq - news - boards), a company few have ever heard of, for about the same worth as AT&T's excellent nationwide wireless division (Manhattan calling not withstanding) seemed at last to say that AT&T had sunk too far.

The pessimism had at last created some value in a market that mocks value. It does so because no management successfully brings out value by itself. Usually a change has to occur. We felt that the more-vocal John Malone, the man who built the modern cable network, was the person who would be likely to see such a catalyst. And why not? Consider how Ted Turner woke up Time Warner (TWX:NYSE)! Both Armstrong and Malone are long-term players who will force change by dint of personality. In this case, Armstrong has been extremely receptive to Malone, which is why I find it somewhat amusing to read press reports about tension at the top.

With the purchase of MediaOne (UMG:NYSE - news - boards) and the spinoff of AT&T Wireless (AWE:NYSE - news - boards), Armstrong has basically been following Malone's game plan to a T. In fact, those who think that the strategies put in place by Armstrong are harebrained and he should just be listening to Malone don't know what they are talking about. These are Malone's strategies.