Ron Hill Growth Quotations

We're focusing much too much on what's moving, which at the margin are the kind of that are negative for stocks and forgetting what's really crucial here. The fact is we are in an excess supply of money relative to the needs of the economy and corporate earnings growth will in fact be quite good in the third quarter.

We have had really spectacular profit reports, by and large, from most companies so far in this quarter. I think retail will be a disappointment, going forward. But, up until now, without any retailers, we've had a nice run. But people have been saying, you know, first of all, the growth rate has slowed from the first quarter to the second, and then the projections are that they will continue to slow down in the third and fourth quarters - we're coming up against really tough comparisons. And I think you know as people look to sort of the slowing of the growth rates, they begin to worry about valuations.

We've been raising rates in this country since about June of last year, so we've had over a year's worth of rate increases starting to flow into the market. That has slowly, but surely, drained liquidity out of the overall financial system in America. So money supply growth has been below nominal GDP growth now for a number of months. So what's happening is slowly, but surely, there's just not enough money out there available to make everything go up all at the same time. So that's why rallies fail sooner than you expect, and why you know people get punished more for bad news than they get rewarded for good news,

These companies have very steady earnings growth, and they are servicing the Internet in substantial ways, the result of which is often bigger revenues bigger than a lot of the dot.com companies on Internet-related activities.

They're on the right track for subscriber growth, ... But more importantly, they're starting to focus now on getting more money out of each subscriber. So one of the tricky things will be to get people to stop focusing purely on subscriber growth and start thinking more about revenue per subscriber. They've got their own sort of gathering area for shopping for e-commerce, for Christmas time. Remember e-commerce season starts now with back-to-school and peaks with Christmas. This is going to be a time of a lot of excitement in the Internet space and we think AOL is well positioned to take advantage of that.

They have not been attractive stocks to own this year because they've had trouble growing revenues, ... But now, all of a sudden, that nice steady growth in earnings -- coupled with the fact that because of the weaker dollar, their translated earnings from international sales are going to be much stronger -- (means) these companies are looking very attractive.

It's giving an encouraging sign that an economic turnaround is around the corner. Sales and profit growth can't be too far behind.

I think next year is going to be a reasonably good year. When the Fed starts lowering rates, even though profit growth will be really poor, often some of the best gains in stocks come when earnings are doing poorly, because you're getting a lift from price-to-earnings ratios rising.

The leadership is going to stay with companies that have very strong earnings growth,