Hi Plant! Now I see you on every board. (-:
The AMD price slide from March to August made me sick in the stomach. I'm relatively new to investing (since '98 with more emphasis in the last couple of years), but I own AMD because it is history in the making. I see a potential huge multiple... if AMD could just become blessed by WS someday.
Anyway, I saw all the discussions of manipulation and insider trading (on Yahoo) and I can't shake the feeling that the slide was simply about the fear of a price war. To WS and Joe Public Investor, I don't think the technical info, that we delve in on these boards, means a thing. Information on automated fab lines, management styles, how long it takes to tape out a chip, the fact that Core 2 Duo is just a Pentium M, no interconnect for multiple cores, Opteron's power footprint, etc, ... none of it means a thing to most people. What does mean something?
* price war from a monopoly!!!
And to a lesser extent, I think people feared the other news that fits in line with the last 20 years of Intel's dominance:
* "65nm node" first
* "dual core" first
* "quad core" first
* "new" line of processors
Add to this the outright lying Intel did about Conroe's abilities and their ability to ramp up production, and things just look bad for AMD from a general view. Still, the big one:
* price war from a monopoly!!!
Frankly, if I were Joe Public on this one, or WS, OR just a great investor that doesn't know tech, I'd run the other way, too!
I held my AMD from 17 up to 42 and back down again. Unfortunately, I leveraged a good 20% in the high 30's, and, sure enough, it dipped enough to force me to sell a bit at the very bottom. Irritating! |
