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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (28624)	10/18/1999 11:42:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Drake, You and I have not agreed on much - maybe because we tend to go head to head on MSFT issues - but I have to agree with you that the NOVL stock is taking a bigger beating than the market conditions and recent NOVL departures would account for. I do think that the Wall Street investor - who does not have a good grasp of NOVL's turn-around - might be over reacting to the arrival of MSFT's Windows2000. The problem with that logic is that the stock should have responded favourably when MSFT announced yet another Win2K delay to Feb/2000. So I don't believe that to be the case. It could be the arrival of the Y2K date, but, that does not explain NOVL's quicker and deeper slide in the stock price over its industry counterparts. In fact, NOVL's products are in very good shape Y2K wise. I personally dont think this is the factor. It could be the investor's extrapolation of NOVL's key senior management leaving the company. Putting the rash of Executive departures in line with the insider trading news that the NOVL Executives had been dumping large volumes of shares in the Q2/1999 period, an institutional investor might be feeling that these are clear signs of up-coming bad news. Maybe a long anticipated bad Quarter of earnings based on some fundamental condition in their marketspace??? Maybe the recent Digital-Me release not meeting up up to all the hype of the product. Unfortunately it was not ready for prime-time (although I am confident that the team will soon clean up the .9 version issues and give the industry an extremely powerful product) and maybe the investors got into a post announcement hangover - i.e. "So whats next from NOVL??" Beyond that, I dont know of any other reason for NOVL's industry leading slide. There could be something afoot, but if so, I dont think we'll know until it shows up. Toy

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (28624)	10/19/1999 12:02:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Here's a couple of possible 'bad news' items to think about: 1) Y2K lockdown is affecting Novell more than expected. By the way, read William Fleckenstein's comments. He thinks that lots of hardware and software companies are going to get majorly hit from the lockdown in the following way-- software and hardware sales were unnaturally high due to purchases being moved up before Y2K lockdowns. Thus, they showed unusual and false growth in sales. Denial on the part of analysts kept them from realizing that this was just front-loading of purchases. Now all the hardware and many software companies are going to disappoint, starting with IBM. 2) Microsoft spreading news about Win2K. We here know the difference between Active Domains^h^h^h^h^h^hirectory and NDS, but that doesn't mean that Goldman Sachs does. 3) Hey, maybe NT4 or Linux is hitting Netware hard and we just don't know about it. Novell does have other products besides NDS, you know.

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (28624)	10/19/1999 9:50:00 AM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Market psychology and NOVL Well Morgan, here's the story --- Win2000 and the past history of Novell with regard to its ability to compete. This hangs heavy on the stock. The institutions bet heavily on the abilities of Eric Schmidt to "turnaround" the company. Eric is committed to an internet strategy, but he is using the old management. Everybody knows that does not compute. Does Eric? So what you are looking for is some earnings shortfall news. And there is nada. It looks like Novell will do well this quarter. Novell is pretty good about keeping analysts up to date on this. Today I closed out my short call position. That may be too early but I grabbed 1 1/8th on 100 contracts on it. Fundamentally NOVL is grossly undervalued. Don't be short the stock at this point. Cover!!! Or run! When you look at a 14 point move in a $31 stock, you've seen it already. In fact you should be aware that the company has an authorized BUYBACK in place which could crush any further short moves.