Jules and all, I would like you to revisit my post in the summer:
techstocks.com
I left about $15/share on the table, but now INTC is pretty much where I sold it. (I used some of the profits to defensively arbitrage the MCIC takeover premium, which felt pretty stupid when BTY reshuffled the deal the day it was supposed to close, but looks better now)
Although I have not had a chance to listen to the earnings report yet (Can anybody here slap up a report? Please?), I understand the big concern is not so much that they missed by a few cents, but that they said Q4 is only going to be slightly better. I don't want to be too repetitive, but my two main concerns remain underappreciated by Intel bulls:
- Overseas growth follows economic conditions and they're still pretty nasty. Domestic growth seems fine, and that's why premier box makers are doing fine.
- There are no killer apps this season that demand more power. I use as a rough guage my own desire to upgrade my system. Besides the baseline level of geek machismo, there is surprisingly little necessity to upgrade. Is the average user, consumer or business, really willing to pay for a $400 233mhz Pentium II when a 166mhz MMX can be had for $100? If you keep all the other components the same, short of MPEG-2 decoding, the average user would barely notice. Hard drive speed, inadequate RAM, and low bandwidth remain the real performance limiters. |
