Jim,
Well, things are so dead around here (including me, wonder if it's the cold weather?), that I became a customer for a Guidant Corp. (GDT) product. Would have been a good stock to buy at its IPO back in Dec. 94. It went from 9 to the current 52 in the last 3 years. But, the current P/E ratio of 57, Y/E 97 of nearly 40 and Y/E 98 of 30, still seems pricey to me.
Costco seems to be doing a good job of hanging in there. I'm surprised since they have an Asian connection (the 2? Korean stores), that the analysts haven't assumed that overall sales will be down 15-20%!! <g>
Anyway, you're right. You need to get into semi-conducters for more excitement than Costco can give you! I haven't check out either of the ones you've mentioned. However, I do own some, either directly or indirectly. Besides Intel (only 100 shares), I have IDTI and SGI. Silicon Graphics has been quite beat up and I'm a bit concerned with how well it is going to do. IDTI is also in the dumps (like most all of them). But I'm more optimistic about it. I've owned it before and did alright with them. They have a number of items that hopefully will do well. For example, they make some of the chips that go into the Web TV and they have a Pentium clone chip ready to market. The later they have simplified the architecture of the chip to make it faster and cheaper, with just a little of the more 'exotic' functions not directly on the chip.
Good luck in whichever one(s) you pick. While the boards here give a lot of opinions on each of them, in the end, it always is 'pay youse money and take youse choice'!
Mat |
