Jim, demeaning speculators is faulty thinking. It's the old envy thing dressed up in different clothes. In fact, the short term speculators do NOT cause the price to go up and down. They reduce volatility. That is their job. If they are bad at their job they lose their shirts. <Q’s long term investor base, being whipped up / down by the fast trading crowd based on short term results / guidance. He now also appears to be taking action (long awaited) on the growing the bottom line commensurate with a growth companies characteristics.>
When speculators short QCOM, they are reducing volatility. The die-hard long term holders watch the price go way up and some novice newby enthusiast bids it up, but they refuse to sell. The shorting speculators see the mania and short QCOM, borrowing the stock from the long term holders. That stops the price going even higher.
The same thing at the bottom. When it's gloom and doom and the die-hard long term holders refuse to sell despite impending bankruptcy, the speculators step in and pay a higher price to cover their shorts or to speculate on a return to good sense.
Speculators REDUCE volatility. That's the only way they can make money.
There is also the old "I'm older than you and have been here longer and so I'm a bigger deal than you" thinking. That's just agism. In many fields, seniority pays more than youthful energy. Sometimes there is experience and knowledge which makes the old geezers more valuable. But in owning shares, there is no merit in old shareholders over some youngster who has bought their first shares with their newspaper delivery earnings just last week.
I'm a long time shareholder in QCOM [now 16 years] and see no reason why my shares should be paid more or treated any differently from shares bought by a 16 year old yesterday.
What I want is to rescue the huge pile of loot from the depredations of government impost. They have warned that they are going to whack it when the temporary dividend tax cuts are stopped soon.
<I also asked him his thoughts re: our equity markets being dominated by high velocity traders-
…He does not think this is positive for society in general.>
That's an opinion. His opinion on FLO was not good, nor BREW, nor the handset division when it failed under his direction. Eudora failed too [and it had phenomenal potential]. If he had got those right, I'd take his opinion on market liquidity with more value. There is nothing at all wrong with supersonic traders in shares. They earn their living by reducing price differences. Finding arbitrage. That's a useful service. It means I don't have to try to do it and they mean I can simply sell, or buy, knowing that the supersonic traders will deliver the market price.
As Android has shown, there was a great opportunity to get BREW right. The current claim that it can be like the ZTE Racer and fit in as a binary run time environment as an option for cheaper devices is disappointing at best. As prices slide and technology continues apace with high end devices become low end all too soon, BREW will be squeezed out the bottom very quickly as Android takes over both high and low end.
The Racer is not expected to have other than a short shelf life. That's the nature of handsets and has been for 15 years as the prices got so cheap that people could upgrade annually.
Umpty $billion and not much imagination to do something with it. Buying Iridigm might turn out to be a winner, but that's buying somebody else's idea. Flarion was bought for the OFDM patents.
I'd rather they give me the money and if they come up with a really good idea, they can raise funds for it [which would be easy for a good idea] or pay for it from future earnings.
Keep in mind that CDMA was developed with Qualcomm as a mere $100 million company. Google and other BIG ideas didn't take mega$billions. Buying railways does. But cyberspace can be very cheap. It just takes brains, then turn it loose.
Qualcomm spends more on lawyers each year than the whole company market capitalisation was worth when the physics-busting big deal technological advances were made. There is too much money gushing out to people other than the shareholders. Soon, the government is going to take a very large chunk of the hard-earned pile of cash.
The purpose of share-markets is to raise capital and provide liquidity to shareholders so they can sell their shares. Time is NOT of the essence. The purpose is specifically NOT to arrange for long-term shareholders. A market is not required for that. Just hand it to Goldman Sachs and say "guarantee us a certain amount of money and you can sell all these shares to long term holders". No share market would be needed.
The reason people buy the freshly minuted shares at all is because they see that they will be able to exit any time they like, selling to short term holders, speculators or even supersonic lightning traders.
Mqurice |
