(sorry for OT and length...)
Hi Meathead; As a long-term bear (though I see the Dow
at 9600 to 10K this summer), I should resond to your
mention that you don't see technical people who are bears.
While I've been trading the market recently, the vast
majority of my income over the last year has been from
designing digital signal processing algorithms (in hardware)
into field programmable gate arrays. I mostly use Altera
and Xilinx parts. My position is usually "Senior Design
Engineer", and I am responsible for getting chips, boards,
and systems designed, debugged, and manufactured.
I know hardware inside and out, and I am quite familiar
with the components that make up a computer.
I built my first micro-computers before operating systems
were available for them. My first '86 machine I built up
from "bare boards" (you buy empty boards. They come
with parts lists, showing where to place each part. You
buy the parts from various mail-order houses, then solder
everything together. Then you figure out what the errors
are, a substantial percentage of which are due to
design errors in the boards you purchased. Finally
you have a computer.) That '86 system was before
DOS, so the operating system it ran was CPM-86.
Back before compatiblity took a lot of the work out
of hardware, I designed, built and debugged my
own 8" dual-floppy controller, and wrote the
software to run it.
So I'm current on technology, particularly hardware,
and have seen a hell of a lot more of this industry
than the vast, vast majority of the people that
contribute to SI, or the 25 year old mutual fund managers
that invest people's "savings" accounts these days.
I also find investing, accounting, economics, history
and business fascinating and read as much as I can
about all these things.
I'm learning to day trade, and gradually getting better.
It is important for a daytrader to ignore long term
considerations in his decisions. So what a stock has
done over the past year, or is fundamentally worth,
should have little influence on a day trader. If you
doubt this, compute what DELL has gone up in
value during the average 10-minute period over
the last year. The number is in the noise figure for
a day trader, and must be ignored. The same applies
to what DELL will be worth a year from now. For
the moment, it just doesn't matter to me.
Is DELL overpriced? I know it is, by quite a lot.
What is DELL going to do tomorrow? My guess is that
it goes up. I intend to be on that bus for some part of
tomorrow, and to make money as the stock rises, just
as I made money today by going long.
Where will DELL be a year from now? My guess is $20
per share, but I'm not making any bets on it.
-- Carl |
