Interesting. From Street.com this morning. See, we're not crazy, the rest of the world is!
(Cramer's column)
We are in the "who cares" mode right now, which is a few sessions before the "get me out at any price" mode. As in "who cares" about that blowout quarter for General Instrument (GIC:NYSE)? Or "who cares" that Merck (MRK:NYSE) has announced a giant buyback and a boost in the dividend? Heck, who cares that GTE (GTE:NYSE) and Bell Atlantic (BEL:NYSE) are getting together?
I know that when the market is in this mode, it very disconcerting. It takes people by surprise, as there are a ton of investors who are still too upbeat. Let's take the General Instrument situation. Tuesday night Jeff Berkowitz, my partner, and I were working after the close when General Instrument reported a "blowout" number, way ahead of consensus.
No matter how gloomy it gets, you still feel good about getting it right, and we felt good about General Instrument. The stock had closed at 26 and we figured it would return to its old high of 29. As euphoric as we were, we still decided to offer 5,000 shares at 28 in Instinet, the buyer-to-seller direct market that trades electronically.
We were taken immediately.
Hmmm, we thought. We are giving the darn thing away. We have genuine-upside-surprise-shorts-must-cover mode going here. Pull the offering.
Wrong!
The next morning we were jolted back to the reality of this market, which was that nobody cared that GIC was great. It was if the whole market were saying, "Heck, man, Lucent (LU:NYSE) blew the numbers away and nobody cared, like why should I buy the GIC?"
You are talking brutal reasoning.
And the stock closed the day unchanged. Three weeks ago we would have been high-fiving after seeing the stock go to 30. Instead we are sitting there thinking, "Now what? Do we hope for a big set-top box contract? Do we bet the market comes to its senses?"
It gets worse. I am reading the release from one of my small S&L holdings. Best quarter ever. Growth prospects unbounded. Lots of cash. No bad loans. Growth market. And what's the stock doing? It's unch. So I call my contact and I ask him if I am missing something. Did I read the release wrong? Was he more cautious than the release led me to believe?
"Not at all," was the answer. "It was a great quarter, but no one cares."
There's that phrase again. |
