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By Jerry Knight
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2000; 4:08 PM

Even people like me who like Coca Cola for breakfast agreed today that Wall Street is right about one thing: Coke doesn’t go with Quaker Oats.

Coke and donuts, sure, but not Coke and oatmeal. Investors choked on the mere thought of that combination today and knocked down the price of Coca Cola Co. stock after learning that Coke is negotiating to buy Quakers Oats Co.

Quaker stock—which trades under the symbol OAT—jumped about $5, but Coke shares dropped by $5, leading the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 167 points to close at 10,504.74.

Oatmeal isn’t what Coke is after. It wants Quaker’s Gatorade business. Gatorade was the first “sports drink” and despite all the competitors trying to muscle their way into the game, Gatorade still has 84 percent of the market.

Quaker turned down a $14.8 billion bid from PepsiCo Inc. a couple weeks ago, so the talks with Coke are seen as the beginning of a possible bidding war. Coke’s thirst for Gatorade isn’t shared by Wall Street analysts, who see the bid for Quaker as an admission that there isn’t much growth left in the conventional soft-drink business.

There isn’t much growth ahead in the communications hardware business either, investors believe, at least not as much as there appeared to be a few months ago.

Investors today continued to dump those stocks, which until recently had been some of the most popular and most pricey technology issues.

Today shares of Juniper Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Redback Networks Inc. and Corvis Corp. fell again after a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. analyst reduced his ratings on the entire industry.

Oracle Corp. shares also took a hit after the company lost its second top executive in the past six months. President Ray Lane quit in July and now executive VP Gary Bloom is bailing out to become chief executive of Veritas Software Corp. Both were considered possible successors to Oracle’ oracle chairman Larry Ellison.

Tanking tech stocks drove the Nasdaq composite index down more than 151 points. That’s close to the same point drop as in the Dow. But the Dow’s trading for more than three times as much as the Nasdaq composite, so on a percentage basis that plunge was much worse: 1.6 percent for the Dow but 5 percent for Nasdaq.