Bruce, the SUNW incident the other day showed what can happen to those 'estimates' and extrapolations given a sudden change in the competitive landscape.
Quite true. A little 'news' can go a long way in either a spooked market or the opposite we had 15 - 18 months ago. I would have to correct my consensus EPS estimates I used to calculate the estimated P/E ratio as I had them at .43 from the analyst consensus number. Management has guided for full year at .39 to .41, so the conservative road to take would be to go with management's conservative figures rather than the consensus analyst EPS estimate. Or at least use the numbers to target a range for PEG and estimated PE.
I imagine the new 'range' for the stock price that would have to break on either side to signal a trend change is the most recent $20.1875 to $28 range. The previous 'brief' range was the $28.375 to $38 range. It's bumping up against that old brief support of $28 which is now the resistance. I'm not sure what the after hours price was, but I'll be watching as we go forward to see what happens at that $28.375 area. Whatever direction it takes, a nice couple of months of basing in some sort of range would interest me. Whether it's $20 to $28 or $28 to $38 - so be it. I'm open to it being in another area as well. I do have some shares now with the appropriate stop set in place. I don't like to guess bottoms as there is little point in doing that, but yesterday was an important day in the market - whatever it was. No predictions from me, but just observing what happened and what could happen. If we get a nice follow through day in the next 4 to 7 days, maybe we have an intermediate trend reversal. Who knows? I'm just watching and observing. The trend could be one day, two days, three days or more.
JNPR was eating CSCO's lunch too, until CSCO said "enough".
That's an interesting game that I follow very closely - especially in regards to the JUNOS vs. IOS software game. Tough, tough, tough space to do business these days with the debt issues of the end customers. The stock prices and their downtrends were screaming over the past couple of months exactly what Redback, Sycamore, Extreme, Foundry, Nortel, Cisco, etc... have already said. Based on the entire space, I imagine Juniper will have cautious words for investors next week during their CC, but who knows?
However, the IP core routing space has longevity and remains attractive to me. Consensus market potential in 2005 pegs the IP core at $16 Billion. That might get adjusted one way or another, but there's plenty of pie to be grabbed by the top two players. Is it a 'winner take all' game? I'm not quite convinced of that, but everything I gather has the technology side from Juniper holding the lead on Cisco. It doesn't matter what Cisco 'says', but what the end customer demands and selects. It's quite possible that in the end, only one or neither will be in the top two players years down the road. Cisco wisely bagged one area of optical this week in which they were unable to compete.
It's a similar game between BEAS and IBM in terms of an enabling product. Is it a 'winner take all' game? Time will tell.
BB |
