"the reason" IBM gives for their -41% performance is that they exited the retail sector.
if you believe IBM, exiting the retail sector remains a onetime event. how can one build a future PC growth model based upon a onetime event? that would not be possible.
you seem to be implying that IBM's -41% performance possibly had as much to do with overall corporate weakness as it did with "exiting the retail sector".
the numbers suggest that there was weakness in their corporate sector but only in relation to the Y2K and the "exiting" - both one time events. no one at IBM was suggesting that this represented an eternal slowdown.
as for this statement: b) if you think that people who would otherwise buy IBM PC's did not buy a PC in the most recent period.
no, I'm not suggesting that you throw IBM's -41% out because it is a mutually exclusive phenomena - I'm saying that the -41% itself - the number, if you will, made worldwide PC sales shift from over 17% to around 14 1/2% - their weight on the average growth number completely skewed the growth of the other players. that's all.
with that large of a skew - why retain it? so suppse they go to a -81% next quarter and all the five biggies remain above 20% - what then? do you still retain their -81%? It seems obvious to me that this represents an IBM issue, a onetime event.
so, in your opinion, Niles can't pick stocks - well, he picked Dell as a strong buy at $35 - as did Kumar, ABM, and others - should say we should have followed him on Dell a few other times as well.
what does Niles picking other stocks have to do with his picking the stock Dell? Dell's PEG ratio, as has been suggested, still trails the S&P. So either the S&P sucks or Dell is significantly undervalued relative to its growth rate.
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