Hi William C. Spaulding; You are correct. The sad fact is that someone has to hold the bag. It would be great if, as a society, we could arrange for no one to be holding stocks when they dropped, but the sad fact is that someone has to hold the bag.
One of the better daytraders I know picked up a tiny position in RMBS today, but picking bottoms is not his strong point. He is looking for a dead cat bounce. He will probably exit tomorrow.
The volume has been sufficient for everyone who was long to get out with a loss in the 80s, and then for everyone who got long in the 80s to get out with a loss in the 70s, but the sad fact is that the bag holders generally just stand there holding the bag.
Some of them got married to a technology that was a little divorced from reality. The assumption was that only Rambus could provide high bandwidth memory systems.
Example of modern usage of graphics memory in what could have been an RDRAM design win, from IBM. Board memory width is x256, providing at least 3.2GB/sec bandwidth, as much as at least two Rambus channels:
Provides exceptional performance at an affordable price
austin.ibm.com
Note that the above product is a quite high end, costing $3000 each. Why didn't the engineers use Rambus? Maybe it's part of the conspiracy.
The fact is that Rambus is unsuited for high end designs. It is more suited for the toy industry, where it started out, due to their low granularity requirements. The hope that they are going to get this technology reliable enough to put into user insertable modules in PCs is a joke. The concept that this is the only technology that provides high bandwidth is a joke. The fact that mom and pop think they know enough about memory to make an investing decision based on that knowledge is a joke. The fact that mom and pop think that they can trust what Intel and Rambus told them isn't a joke, it's a tragedy. Bag holders.
-- Carl |
