The Nas was at today's level, in
April 2001 and
October 1998 and
September 1997.
siliconinvestor.com
That market has given up 4 full years of gains.
Intel, too, has been dead money for 4 years, valued now exactly where it was at the 1997 peak
siliconinvestor.com
A couple of years ago, I posted a detailed comparison of AMAT and INTC, and the relationships between their businesses and the stocks. Wish I could find it now. Does anyone know how to search SI, by author, thread name, and keyword?
The S&P 500 is back to the level first reached in March 1998
siliconinvestor.com
and has given back 3 1/2 years of gains.
Meanwhile, AMAT
siliconinvestor.com
has "only" given up two years of gains,
and is still 48% above the 1997 peak.
Interestingly, the SOX
siliconinvestor.com
chart looks more like AMAT than INTC: (2 years gains gone, but still 27% above the 1997 peak).
NVLS has done far better than AMAT. It has only given up one year's gains, is 73% above the 1997 high, and still far above where it was 2 years ago.
siliconinvestor.com
stock/index, % change from 1997 high to today:
S&P500 11%
Nasdaq -2%
SOX 27% (405 to 514)
AMAT 48% (27 to 40)
NVLS 73% (22 to 38)
KLAC 16% (38 to 44)
CYMI -51% ( 49 to 24)
KLIC -55% (29 to 13)
INTC 1% (25.5 to 25.9)
These results, frankly, are a big surprise. It refutes my longheld beliefs that:
1. in tech industries (other than very new markets), the bigger company usually continues to gain market share, while #2, #3, and so on gradually fall further behind (in their businesses, and in their stocks). AMAT is the emerging Gorilla in semi-equip. I would have expected AMAT to at least track with NVLS, not do substantially worse.
2. investing in semi-equips, picking the peaks and troughs of the cycle is more important than picking a particular stock.
3. Longterm, the leading semi (INTC) and semi-equip (AMAT) will track closely, as their fortunes are intimately entwined.
I may come up with very different results, if I pick other start points for my comparison (like, say, the 1998 bottom, or the 2000 top). I'm not sure what all this means, but my tentative conclusions are:
1. there seems to be a rough correlation between size and returns in semi-equips, with the bigger companies (AMAT, NVLS) doing better than the smaller companies (like CYMI).
2. it does matter which semi-equip I pick, and AMAT may not be the very best one. If I don't know which is the best, perhaps I should split my money among AMAT and NVLS (certainly), and KLAC and CYMI (?)
3. Intel's lagging results confirms my belief that semi growth has shifted away from their core business, and they are so big they can't outperform the index. |
