Yousef, I hear you. Kurlak's greatest flip-flop IMHO has to be his May 29, 1997 INTC estimate. According to the WSJ's "Heard on the Street" piece on Kurlak run sometime this past August, he lowered his 1998 numbers from 11.00/share to 10.20/sh following INTC's May pre-announcement...
...and then the next day, not only does he change his mind on the cut, he actually increases his 1998 estimate to 11.20/sh.
If his current 1998 estimate on INTC is more than half of that, I'll wash the man's car every weekend for the next 10 years.
It's almost as if this one man's opinion on the fundamentals mean more to some market participants than the actual fundamentals themselves. We'll see if it somehow makes it out of his orbit, but there's this tractor beam that's going to keep pulling it back whenever it looks like it stands a chance of breaking some overhead resistence.
I can appreciate the upside of some of the Asian cutbacks. If I don't, I'm going to be flying with faulty radar once those benefits start playing out, but my take is to be a little patient and see how some of the other factors play out. And if that's too cautious and someone else can accept the risk and they're right - good for them.
In a 12/2/97 Money online piece, he's reported to be looking for a 50% pullback in the $SOX from it's 1997 highs, because according to TK in each of the 6 downturns chip sector since 1970, the $SOX has lost half it's value from peak to trough.
pathfinder.com
That's great. Nice to know that the industry today is exactly as was in 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, etc. Nothing's changed. INTC is still making memory chips, there is no PC-industry to speak of, chips used in networking equipment - networking equipment, what's that? IC's are used in just as many end products today as they were back in the mid 70's, procurement works the same way, distributors today function exactly as they did back then, and no one's ever heard of BTO - so clearly anyone who questions the validity of the cycle retracement theory of "the best there is" is not living in "the real world" and is "just plain stupid" <g>
I'll say it again, the way the markets and CNBC treats him, he could blow his nose on old newspaper to support a ratings change and we'd see Mark Haines reporting it without actually bothering to read any of the supporting arguments behind the call or (and this is really asking a lot) actually going back and comparing it to what he wrote a few months earlier.
Good trading,
Tom |
