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TWST: How do you appraise the past performance of these stocks?

Mr. Bensche: If you look back at just the last 10 months, we’re citing performance numbers that are negative. But last year, if you look at the performance, they were up 300%, 500%, 600%, all over the place. If you go back to, say, January 1, 1999, we’re probably still doing real well. So if you were the guy who bought at the highs around March 1 this year, yes, you are way underwater. But on the whole we are very bullish on the sector and I’ve got mostly buys on the stocks. I think the sell off has created even more opportunity. I hypothesize you’re buying data for free right now and a lot of these stocks are not even trading at voice-only values. So if you take a longer perspective, it’s perhaps not as bad, but we’re all feeling it, because the last few months we’ve been down a lot. At Lehman, we’ve been talking about a thesis for the telecom group of overcapitalization and too much money flowing in in too short of a time period across a lot of sectors. If you are showing incremental returns on assets, if you look at the money being invested today as being significantly below last year’s vintage of capital spending (and it’s the nature of the telecom business — front-loaded investment, load the network), you earn the money out the back end with a lot of operating leverage. In wireless it started to hit an inflection point where things were really kicking.

TWST: John, any suggestions?

Mr. Bensche: Another way to play the sector is a little bit more offbeat, namely the designated entity companies, companies that qualify for the FCC set-aside blocks, of which there are 10 megahertz in New York, for example. One of the three pieces will be available with small businesses. TeleCorp PCS (Nasdaq:TLCP) qualifies as a designated entity and is very tight with AT&T (NYSE:T) and would likely serve as a partner. TeleCorp could serve as a way for AT&T to indirectly get to big city blocks, in a much less competitive auction.

TWST: My last question, then, would be about your work. Meeting analysts' estimates isn't the most important thing in running a business, but it helps. How does the volatility in the market affect your work? Do you have to keep investing a target price or earnings estimates, for instance? John?

Mr. Bensche: Certainly in volatile markets your phone traffic increases a lot, more when they're falling than when they're rising. When they're rising, the buyside takes credit for it, and when they're falling, it's the stupid analyst who put you in the stock. So you get a lot of hand-holding calls. I don't whip my targets around a lot. I felt I stretched a bit last February when I threw data into the models, which I had always held out as unquantified upside. But the stocks were through my targets and I felt the market was saying to me, “You're being too bearish, we're willing to pay for data.” And I said, “All right, let's try to quantify it.” So I put it in, and now the market has given it all back up again.