To All, I received my copy of The High Tech Strategist today. Just so folks understand, I subscribe to and read Fred Hickey's newsletter. I have never spoken to him or met him in person. I have seen him at meetings, but we were busy getting gossip from different people. Ditto for Bill Fleckenstein and Will Lyons. The reason I mention this is that I often hit on themes that are later covered in these newsletters, and folks have questioned that coincidence. I do not feed them info and Fred charges me for the newsletter. <G> The only way I can explain it is that analysts who can think and chew gum at the same time sometimes reach the same conclusions. And I certainly do not blame Hickey, Fleck or Will for any erroneous conclusions I come up with, even if they do reach the same ones. Early is a different story. I post to him here as do several of you. I don't think he gets anything from me, but there is some dialouge.
1. Fred documents lower DRAM prices and the fact that capacity is increasing geometrically just as the busy demand season ends. He still calls Micron the gift that keeps on giving and I couldn't agree more. Funny comment away from Fred. On CNBS, Bob Pisanti (sp) mentioned how wonderfully well MU was doing. "It is still not at an all-time high," he said. But, Bob, all it has to do is rise another 74% to get there. These guys do love to tout their MU.
2. Fred finds it odd that LLTC more than doubled in price after announcing LOWERED eps forecasts and without its business picking up. And the herd says they are investors. <G>
3. He is predicting disaster for AMAT and Novellus. Some prediction. They are already in a disaster and business is getting worse. Fred, on this bit of crystal ball gazing, I rate you a medium. <G>
4. Nearly three full pages deal with an Intel History lesson. Fred is one polite dude. He really thinks that Intel made honest mistakes on the huge number of fallacious forecasts they have made over the past three years, though I did notice he used the word "sly" once to describe them. I don't think they are that dumb. Anyway, while I blithely state that I don't believe anything they say, and that they have frequently misled investors in the past, Fred documents the misleading statements chapter and verse. Hopefully the Intel herd will have their nannies read these incidents to them before it is too late. <G> Needless to say, Hickey thinks the latest very minor uptick is going to last all of one quarter, with the co. once again saying "whoops" early next year.
5. One of the reason my pc market ramblings often sound like Fred's is that we both have sources at the distributors that we consider valuable. I assume they are different people, as he quotes some cos, like TechData, where I have no contacts. And my contacts are mostly relatives. <G> His sources also confirm that sell-through is a mirage. Inventory is building to a mountain.
6. He hates many of the tech stocks I hate, but also has puts on Amazon, where I don't have the guts, and Samnina, where I haven't done any homework.
MB |
