One of the things that surprised me, and took me several years of investing before I believed it, was just how emotional stock-buying and selling is, for many investors. From reading this thread, it's clear that about half the posters are married to the stock. It's an excellent analogy, for how investors get besotted by a stock, and are incapable of any rational cost/benefit risk-balancing analysis. Everything negative gets explained away or ignored, everything positive gets magnified and repeated. And, when you get a group of people on the same thread who are married to a stock, and they post back and forth to each other every day, it just reinforces their inability to understand what's happening. IMO, it is clear that the NTAP thread has served as a forum for group delusion.
You said: "We have a group of investors who are struggling to reconcile the excellent performance of an enterprise with the failure of its stock"
There is nothing to reconcile. The stock has been performing quite well. Look at a log chart of the stock :
siliconinvestor.com
Ignore the irrational exuberance that happened after late 1999. That's an outlying data point that went far outside the pattern. Draw a "best-fit" straight line on the remainder of the chart, and you can see that we are just returning to that line now. And it's a nicely rising line. The only question is whether the irrational valuations for NTAP started in late 1998, or late 1999. The air is out of the stock, that's all that happened in the last 6 months. The mania is over, and stocks are beginning to be reconnected to reality.
6 months ago, you should have been "struggling to reconcile" NTAP's stock price with the fundamentals of the company. That's what's hard to reconcile. |
