Ramsey, 0.50 drop in the midst of lots of other drops, so I'll offer you a draw. A factor which I suspect strongly affects Qcom is "computer war" trading, where programs fight each other based on their expectation of next move, irrespective of real outcomes to the company. Qcom has volatility and volume, both ideal components for trading games. When their computers throw a fit and sell at $32, that is fine by me.
People worry that stock market crashes are bad for the economy. They are, but that is only a symptom. What is bad is mismanaged capital, ie investment in unprofitable activity. When that is debt funded, then you can get some real prangs as it destroys the lender as well as the borrower. Then a long process of market clearing and restabilization has to take place. People were living a fantasy [perpetual motion machine printing dollars] instead of a dream, [Kennedy's race to the moon]. Our job in Silicon Investor is to know the difference [not easy]. Which is the Henry Ford Production Line and which is the Ponzi scheme? And profit from excessively low or high prices on real things like Qcom when hubris or demoralization get loose.
Ramsey, I know that is preaching to the converted in your case, but others might be interested. [They should be; judging by some of these threads].
I agree, until sales are putting profits in the bank, most people won't be interested. Rightly so. If they can't understand it, why on earth should they buy it, if others [Ericsson and co] who should be equally knowledgeable call CDMA pie in the sky? There are some more CDMA criticisms today in Investors Business Daily. We get it here too, but electronically/photonically. Same old criticisms with a couple of outright lies thrown in - they said Qualcomm claimed in 1990 that CDMA would be ready in a year. It was 1993 that they first expected product sales. Read the Dec 91 IPO prospectus for the long list of warnings that it was quite possibly never going to happen.
They actually got to market in 1995 with Hutchison in Hong Kong and more now, so they were only a couple of years out. No reports of problems = no news is good news, though GSM people say there are more dropped calls and voice quality isn't as good as TDMA in Hong Kong. I wonder how they did those tests? Lies from competitors are great; it means they haven't got anything better.
Meanwhile, Eudora is getting more boost. See Qualcomm's home page at qualcomm.com Eudora could turn out to be a very large profit centre if they can go fast enough to keep the multitudes happy and not straying to competitors. I don't understand that area so well, so would welcome comment.
The news about AirTouch has been expected for so long that it has probably been discounted and more important will be reports by the public on how good it is. Then people will say it has passed your "show me" or "prove it" test. MIW |
