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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (74664)	1/27/2000 1:24:00 PM
From: TRINDY	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike, I don't know if you saw this stuff, but it is good for a laugh. Talk about perverse reasoning! "Obviously it was a major miss, which is not good," said Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Fortuna. "But the good news is it finally caused the management to capitulate in respect to lowering the long-term growth rate of the company to the low 30 percent range from the high 30 percent range." Dell's profit warning is its second in recent months and comes on the heels of slower-than-expected PC sales during the lucrative holiday buying season. The change in buying patterns raises questions whether the PC market can sustain its recent rocket growth. Merrill Lynch's Fortuna early today upgraded Dell stock from "neutral" to "buy," in part on Dell's revised growth rate expectations. He also based his revised rating on the firm's market performance in servers and notebooks. Chase Hambrecht & Quist analyst Walter Winnitzki also upgraded the stock, from "market perform" to "buy." Ashok Kumar, an analyst at US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, upgraded Dell from "buy" to "strong buy." But Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown analyst Philip Rueppel downgraded Dell from "strong buy" to "buy." Kumar voiced similar sentiments as Fortuna. "If you look last year at Dell's stock, it grossly underperformed in broad market indexes, in spite of having grown revenue of 38 percent. The momentum money essentially drained out of the stock last year, so the company was barely struggling to meet the consensus toward expectations of 40 percent," he said. Kumar added that "having the company reset the bar to a much more meaningful level" means "the strength should return to the stock."