Wayde,
I pray your long move on Ascend works out for you.....around noon I seriously considered shorting Ascend, but then on second thought, since it is a bull market, I bought 3Com instead. I have so little confidence in the management of ASND/CSCC that I just stay away from the stock all together. Ascend stock is a real sucker's play since the management is such a bunch of amateurs when it comes to guiding the street's expectations....and the worst part about it is that it is the small investor that gets burned with it every time. In my experience, just when Ejabat and Smith are painting a rosy picture of ASND/CSCC in the media, they are letting the big boys in on the real deal so that the big boys can unload all their stock on the hapless suckers. Remember CSCC's big drop earlier in the year.....it wasn't until 2 weeks later, after the damage had been done, that the little guy found out the drop was a result of comments CSCC's management had made to a select group of institutional investors. Any CSCC investors from the JAN 97 timeframe left out there on this thread? Another favorite of mine was Ejabat's bullish comments in that interview he gave to the press right before ASND's 56k software bug was announced. I wonder how many small investors bought ASND because of Ejabat's bullishness only to loose their shirts a few days later because of margin calls resulting from the bearish news Ejabat didn't disclose? Today's market action was, to my mind, a crowning achievement for Ejabat, Smith & Co. With the help of 20/20 hindsight, now it is clear to me that Ascend's price and volume action last week wasn't consolidation, but the stock rolling over on account of the yet unpublished news....I'm sure it took Montgomery Securities at least five trading days to type and edit today's downgrade.
Wayde, your analysis of Ascend and Cascade's 5 day sales training love-in is interesting, but to me it just further confirms my suspicion that Ascend and Cascade have great engineers and poor managers. Did Ejabat, Smith & Co. ever learn time management? Management's first priority must be increasing sales and market share....everything else is subordinate to that. Ascend's managers must have realized the ATM and frame relay market was soft (NN's sure did and they made that preannouncement).....if this meeting was so important, instead of pulling Cascade's sales force off line for 5 days they could have had this meeting over a couple of weekends or after close of business daily so as to accomplish the sales mission during the day. In my opinion, today's fiasco in the market is a direct result of Ascend's management dereliction of their duties to the company's stockholders.
Christopher |
