Okay, I'm calming down. Here are my (feeble) thoughts:
1. Intraday low tomorrow of between 24 and 28 3/8. I pick 24 because it is 1/3 off of today's high, just as the actual earnings are 1/3 off of the average estimate going into today. I pick 28 3/8 because it is a bit less than 1/2 off of the stock price in July, just as the actual earnings are a bit less than 1/2 off of what was expected then. It's stupid, but it's my yardstick.
2. News of the $200M-$300M NTT deal hardly moved the stock. Ditto on the smaller but still significant UUNET deal. What was bad then will, I think, be supportive now. What I mean is that the bad news is over and done with, yet ASND is still sitting there with these contracts (the Street likes certainty), contracts not yet included in any quarter's results. These contracts couldn't stop the earnings downdraft, but they can cushion the landing.
3. It's weird, but just as the bad earnings news was out, I started to encounter positive news stories about ASND, something I had not seen for a long, long time. Items posted on this thread include (1) customers happy with the latest s/w fix for MAX TNT (this means sales, finally), (2) PC Magazine selected the Pipeline 130 as an Editors Choice product, (3) a Smartmoney article that included, for a change, a positive spin on ASND. It's not worth a damn, I know, but my intuition about these items -- and the potential sales implicit in them -- suggests that the stock is going to track upwards (after the ballyhoo about earnings is over), not downwards.
Gary Korn |
