Hi Don,
I'm just catching up with the thread, so I'm sorry this reply is a few days late.
With respect to TSM, I like to use them as a proxy for the SOX but I'm not sure they are one of the better investments ideas. The nature of their business seems to limit the upside. It gets harder and harder to negotiate with your customers for higher pricing if you are showing massive profits on your earnings releases. I think that TSM will always be in a situation where they will be forced to limit their profit growth/margins due to concessions given to customers to win their business. However, they are a great indicator as to how the industry is doing and they help us monitor how bullish or bearish we should be. They are a solid investment for those who don't want to stick their neck out too far, imo.
Reviewing the action over the last few days it looks like we are seeing a lot of funds selling out before the end of the quarter. No surprise there as they have had terrific gains in many stocks. In watching some of the lower volume smalls and micros, they are taking advantage of the weak buying to push down many of these on very low volume. I think there is a nice opportunity setting up and I will probably be picking off a couple of these over the next couple of days, as I expect the selling to increase, especially where there's been little buying support. I don't see the MMs holding up anything in my universe, they are just letting the floors disappear. Quite a few of the micros I follow are down 15-25% on very low volume. FSII, AXTI, EGLS and SYXI are a few examples and it's clear that they could go quite a bit lower, depending on where people step up to the plate. These 4 have charts that indicate to me that they could go much lower or reverse quickly, depending on when and where traders decide that they've been discounted too much, too fast.
I'm getting an itchy trigger finger...but I have to patient. I think we are going to see more selling (for no reason other then we've needed a correction to encourage the shorts and discourage the bulls).
jmo |
