Deeno,
There is no other publicly traded company in the world that is as committed to the VR industry as NUAN so you wont find an apples-to-apples comparison. It's the only pure play in the business that you or I can buy.
Have you ever used it's products? I have Dragon Naturally Speaking installed on this computer and it's performance is damned impressive. As they say, embedded devices are the wave of the future. The challenge is getting the voice algorithms encoded at the chip level and waiting for Moore's Law to get the processing power to the point that it is cheap enough and small enough for that Palm Centro to process the speech natively and at the speed of normal speech just as it does in my Sony laptop computer. At that point, I can ditch the laptop. How long it takes to get there is an open question, as is the precise value of NUAN's IP that may distinguish them from their much more powerful but less focused competitors, as Sr. K has alluded to earlier.
But getting back to the major point of your enquiry, if you want to see other small companies that have taken similar beatings lately, you can have a look at ACM and ELON, for example. I know because I own them, and the selloffs have been brutal. When the market sniffs a recession, it frequently shoots first and asks questions later. The fact is nobody knows exactly how bad the impact is going to be so they just start taking profits. The earnings reports and conference calls provide quarterly reality checks.
Even if there is some bad news out there that is not yet public, the stock price has probably already priced it in and more. I think that's what today's price action signifies.
If you're reluctant to pull the trigger in here, you may want to just wait for the news instead. Once it rises on negative news, it will probably be safe to re-enter the market. When stocks fall on or shortly after positive news, that tends to signal the reverse phenomenon. And these reactions tend not to be confined to a particular stock or sector.
Enjoy earnings season, Deeno.
Sam |
