Sun,
I saw your P.S. about 200 posts back on my stop...I've got a really funny story...by the end of last week I thought that TDFX was shelfing and got back into a long position! To add to the story, I had a business trip Monday morning through the week and left totally unaware of Monday mornings news release regarding STB. Coincidentally, I decided not to check any stocks over the week and didn't check into SI until last night. Over 200 unread posts on the SI TDFX thread! By the 5th post, I read the news....The only bright spot in all of this is that I originally had TDFX in two accounts, mine and my sons and only took a long position in my account; Sunday night anticipating volatility in the markets due to the impeachment hearings and Iraq I put in another stop which turns out limited my losses to about 1/2 of what they would have been.
After reading the over 200 posts, I'm a little amazed at the general strong optimism of the group. This is not to say that the business decision/acquisition made be 3Dfx was a poor one. I have to agree with you that the risk side has gone up substantially. 3Dfx is going to abandon it's largest customers, i.e., Diamond and Creative and STB is abandoning it's largest selling product. IMO it becomes virtually impossible to predict with any reliability what revenues will be 6 months from now. OEM sales are probably determined 70% supplier vs. 30% product so in that sense one has reason to be optimistic. On retail sales, certainly some significant portion is driven by branding provided by Diamond and Creative but how much? We can postulate but I don't think anyone really knows. It does seem reasonable that 3Dfx needs to step up the branding effort and by this time next year they could very well have equivalent branding to that of Diamond and Creative, but this seems pretty optimistic.
I would have quite a bit of difficulty taking a long position (again)at this moment and it seems better to revisit the possibility as time goes on. But I'll certainly continue to read the thread, there is always something dramatic going on.
Best Regards,
Jim |
