I don't know anything about manipulators, but I'll take a stab at the BtB issue.
This rally, such as it is, on BtB news represents grasping at straws IMO. The fact that the book-to-bill ratio is still below one means that the order backlog is still shrinking. It is also important to look at the trend of bookings. These have started a slight uptrend as shown by the green line on this chart.
suite101.com
Although this chart shows the uptrend starting a couple of months ago, it was not apparent until now, because each SEMI report revises the previous two months' reports, and until yesterday's revision, the previous two months showed a downtrend, not an uptrend. This can be seen by looking at the table in last month's report:
dom.semi.org!OpenDocument
So Wall Street has suddenly learned that the semiconductor equipment industry has been in a slight uptrend for the last few months instead of a slight downtrend, and that is probably why the sector is up a little today.
Why am I unconvinced that happy times are here again for the sector? Two reasons:
1. It's only a slight improvement in bookings, hardly the makings of the kind of rip-roaring recoveries we have seen in prior cycles.
2. Prior sector bottoms have also been accompanied by an upturn in global semiconductor sales (the red line on the following chart). So far we haven't seen that.
suite101.com
(BTW, the above link still shows a downtrend in bookings as of this writing. It will show the slight uptrend as soon as Gottfried finishes updating the charts with yesterday's data.)
For those who don't like icky, nasty fundamentals <g>, I would say that changes in the fundamentals are one of the things that can cause a downchannel to change to an upchannel, or vice versa.
Here is the table of contents for Gottfried's charts, for those who do not already have the link:
suite101.com |
