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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (33603)	12/30/1999 6:16:00 AM
From: Duker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Can we switch to a football analogy? I think it would be more appropriate; football players face the prospect of catastrophic injury on every play. As we get further into the cycle and we try to guess when is the best time to extricate ourselves from the game, I feel more like a football player. We, as investors, run the risk of various and sundry painful injuries -- the investment equivalent of hamstring pulls, turf toes, concussions, shoulder separations, ACL/MCL/PCL damage, neck injury, or (for Terry Glenn and players of his ilk) a serious case of the 'I'm-not-going-to-the-playoffs-sniffles.' In my opinion, the risk of loss in football better represents the downside in the SemiCap stocks and the pain of a SemiCap trough. Baseball just can not capture the physical devastation that is so crucial to football. Now, the mental torture of baseball is a completely different animal -- especially if you live in Boston. I think that I have Post ALCS Umpire Syndrome. I wake at night in a sweat after dreaming of cruising through seven or eight innings, only to have the second base umpire steal away any hope of a victory. As I turn to throw my can of beer at the Buffoon in Blue, James Morgan grabs my arm and warns me that there appears to have been some double-ordering in the fourth quarter of 1999. End user demand is not as strong as their customers had first thought, so they are going to 'digest' their most recent round of capital purchases. Our semiconductor clients hope to release their planned budget in the second half of the year. We view this as only a brief plateau. We still think that we are in the middle rounds of a fight scheduled for twelve. We at Applied think the industry is feeling the effects of the crash in the internet IPO market. There is just not as much money being devoted to the build-out of the internet as we would have thought, now that these e-companies have to fund their capital purchases with funds from operations. It doesn't help that hoards of practically new, leased servers and PCs are being blown-out by the finance companies who were such willing lenders to those 'Didn't Quite Get to the Next Round' internet start-ups. It was hard to see the link between the froth in the IPO market and the demand for silicon. Chalk that one up as a lesson learned. Still, the long-term growth prospects for the industry are as bright as I have seen in my thirty year career at Applied ... Wow. This post doesn't really seem to make much sense. Then again, QCOM just became a bigger market cap than Berkshire Hathaway on PaineWebber's 'Round It To The Nearest Thousand Daytrader Price Target.' --Duker