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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shoot1st who wrote (38324)	6/9/2000 2:41:00 PM
From: Lost1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

I see a downgrade too, but here is this.. Friday June 9, 1:01 pm Eastern Time MotleyFool.com - Fool Plate Special The Irrationality Mix at Citrix By Brian Graney Any investor who has followed the day-to-day shifts of corporate stock market valuations closely for any reasonable length of time has probably developed their own compendium of favored short-term market irrationalities. Among the stock-specific things that regularly tend to drive this particular writer crazy are (in no particular order) stock split run-ups, self-serving me-too press releases from companies, and the always-annoying but often amusing misguided Barron's hatchet job. I'm so sick of that last one. But giving these stock price shakers a run for their money is a new fave -- the increasingly popular "missing corporate executive panic." This irrationality has most recently made a serious dent in the share price of application server software developer Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS - news). Citrix was heading south for a 17% loss this morning, adding to a 14% slide yesterday, ostensibly because CFO John Cunnigham sent another company executive in his place to give a speech and rub elbows at a PaineWebber investing conference. In the blink of an eye, news services were extrapolating that the blow-off means something terrible must be going wrong at Citrix. Oh, please. How many times will long-term investors need to watch jumpy stock market speculators go down this road to nowhere? So the guy ditched a stock lovefest appearance. Big deal. We've seen this tired act before, most memorably last fall during a similar freak-out that battered CDMA chipset Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM - news). The only difference during that short-lived drama was that Qualcomm threw a pacifier to the worry-worts the next day in the form of a press release reassuring the world that it would meet or exceed earnings estimates for its current quarter. No such spoon-feeding was issued forth from Citrix today, which probably goes a long way in explaining the severity of this morning's dive. Citrix may get a big failing grade today in Protocol of Expectations Management 101, but a CFO bailing on a conference is far from the kind of single-event red flag that should prompt long-term shareholders to reconsider their investments. Besides, Citrix has already shown that it doesn't always march in lockstep with the Wall Street drummer. For instance, the firm's 50% year-over-year revenue growth last quarter only (gasp!) met expectations, leading one Fool to quip, "Doesn't this company know that it has to beat expectations?" What's heartening from all of this, however, are indications that sell-side analysts are refusing to play the missing executive game. For instance, a Dain Rauscher Wessels research report this morning available from Multex downplayed the missing CFO angle. Instead, analyst Deana Schreindl explained her downgrade of the company to "buy" from "strong buy" by citing indications of abnormal discounting in the channel and slowing new account acquisition growth, which may hamper Citrix's margins this quarter. We'll have to wait and see whether the CFO brush-off comes back to haunt the company, as well as whether Schreindl's concerns show up in Citrix's financial results. Earnings for the current second quarter are set to be released July 17, and may contain some lumpiness. The firm is adjusting to selling into the still-evolving application services provider channel and is in the midst of sharpening its corporate focus to drilling its products into deeper layers of its existing enterprise client base. At the same time, management is considering an incrementally higher R&D spending rate this year and is coping with the growing pains associated with running a business that has expanded to 1,300 individuals today from less than 150 just three years ago. Bumps along the company's heretofore rather steady growth track are to be expected if Citrix is to continue to be a leader in its space in the future. Investors should anticipate short-term worries to come and go in the days ahead, and probably a few more future instances of conference no-shows by executives as well. However, as has been said by other Foolish commentators before, the thought process behind the decision to sell a stock should be just as deliberate and businesslike as the process involved in buying one. Rash behavior benefits no one -- except your broker.