Mang:
Your contributions to this thread have been considerable and well appreciated, I'm sure by more than just I, and I hope you stick around and don't give up. This has been a real whack up the side of the head, and serves to point out even that the stocks of good companies like Palm with good products and a leading position in a rapidly growing market can get taken down by combinations of circumstances that are not really predictable.
I believe that this Q4 screw up will turn out to be a one-time event, and that Palm will recover from it by year end. I'm prepared (as I usually am) to give what I consider a good management team the benefit of the doubt one time, and allow that even good management teams can get hit by things they have little or no control over. But I'm also going to keep a close watch for the next few months for other signs that they are, as Khan said, "stretched too thin", or maybe not just up to the task of managing the rapid growth of the company in a rapidly growing business. One major screw up is already one too many, whatever the reason, and shareholders have paid the price.
Running on margin is a risky approach, as I found out myself in Oct 1997. Since then I've used margin sparingly, and only for short periods. You could (IMO) do worse than a large Palm position around this price, in a couple of years you could look back and see it was one of the smarter things to have done.
Good luck.
David T. |
