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Technology Stocks : Kulicke and Soffa -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BWAC who wrote (3937)	7/23/2000 6:17:00 PM
From: Donald Wennerstrom	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5482

Your post started me thinking (oops! - there goes that silly word again when applied to the stock market) about my approach to the market. It may be that I have been thinking about it in the wrong way - it is not a stock market, or a market of stocks, but a big casino like they have in Las Vegas. I like your thought on "momentum" plays by the mutual funds and other big players. Looking back over the past week, Monday (keep in mind I'm writing in generalities here) was an "up" day for the semi-equips and essentially no earnings announcements were released. On Tuesday, quite a few earnings announcements were made (mostly very good), but the semi- equips as a group lost ground. By Wednesday, the group was in full retreat even though it was obvious by this time that earnings for the group were, in general, spectacular. As a good example, I own some shares of ASYT. On Wednesday, the stock went from 37.38 to 35.31, a loss of 6 percent. After the close of the market day on Wednesday, the quarterly results for ASYT were released. Operating results handily beat all projections - earnings beat First Call estimates by 26 percent. Everyone was ecstatic - the stock was really going to "rumble" on Thursday. Well, it rumbled alright - it went from 35.31 to 28.06, a loss of 21 percent on 5.9 M shares, about 6 to 8 times normal volume. To add insult to injury, the stock closed down again on Friday at 27.12. Of course during Thursday and Friday, the semi-equips were in a full-scale rout. It mattered not what earnings were posted. All the stocks were going down, big-time, including KLIC announcing absolutely stellar results on Thursday morning. In other words, negative momentum was in "full swing". Apparently, the institutions, mutual funds and market makers can do anything they want under any conditions. They just proved that to me last week. When you can swing stocks like KLIC, ASYT, LRCX, KLAC, NVLS and others (AMAT was down 12 percent for the week) to losing 20 to 30 percent of their value in one week while releasing record bookings, revenues and profits for the quarter, they showed me they can do anything. One thing I am sure of, it was not the retail investor that led to this result. As an example, ASYT has about 32 M shares outstanding. On Thursday, 5.9 M shares traded (which is the largest number ever traded I believe) which is about 18/19 percent of the total. That means the "big boys" were in there "stomping" around like elephants determined to "go with the flow" and drive the price down. Now that we know "they" can do anything they want to do, at any time they want to do it, under any conditions of revenue and earnings, good or bad, a different strategy has to be pursued to make money in the market that does not depend on rational thinking. Cheers! Don W.