John,
First, kudos to you for your thoughtful and well written posts. Yep, Lou gets away with it, I think part of the deal on IBM is that the street is more forgiving of them due to lower valuation. I think one of the keys for Dell is what the institutions do. If they decide the party is really over for the most part then you will see persistent selling again, a replay of the past year, but without as much downside. The stock could move into the 50's based on WIN2K enthusiasm at some point this year, but Dell in my opinion will need to string together a couple solid quarters to keep it there and change it from a trading vehicle. The other question mark is Compaq's Ipaq. If it catches on, does Dell bring out a competing product and take a hit on it's Dimension ASP's?? As for a correction, it must be all those years watching the market that is clouding my judgement <ggg>. I simply think that a 90% move in the Nasdaq should result in a 20-25% correction at some point.
One final thought - I keep reading about how Dell will remain an Intel only shop. Seems to me you want to eliminate 'single points of failure', and I don't see how a strong and healthy AMD is anything but a positive for the boxmakers.
Regards,
John
PS - Niles is pretty good on his 'end of quarter' prognostications, but he has been quite wrong on some longer term calls. Intel comes to mind, I distinctly remember him suggesting that the stock should be sold when it was in the 50's last summer. Stock doubled instead. |
