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To: EACarl who wrote (9387)	1/23/2001 12:23:27 AM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 10921

Eric, your reasoning makes sense to me. Unfortunately - as you know - the market doesn't always reward reason. Regards Gottfried

To: EACarl who wrote (9387)	1/23/2001 1:23:16 AM
From: Math Junkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

You do have a point though, if enough people look at those long term charts and believe in an eternal 2 year cycle, it will become a self fulfilling prophesy regardless of the underlying business fundamentals. Your comment prompted me to look up a graph of industry cycles going all the way back to 1974. This was posted last summer by Carl Johnson of Infrastructure: infras.com The thing that becomes apparent from counting the years between bottoms is that the length of the cycle is highly variable, ranging anywhere from two to seven years. So we can't just forecast them based on a period of time. We must try to look for the underlying business conditions which indicate tops and bottoms. It is also clear that the consecutive slumps in 1996 and 1998 were atypical. In fact they were so short that on this year-over-year graph they couldn't even be resolved were it not for the double dip in chip growth. The 1998 slump was "caused" by the Asian financial crisis. I put that word in quotation marks because it's not entirely clear to me that it wasn't the other way around: namely that the Asian crisis was precipitated in large degree by the reckless abandon with which semiconductor industry investment was being engaged in. From that point of view, the frothy level of investment which existed then in Asia could be analogous to the level which existed for the U.S. last winter. The excesses which came to a head last winter are now being unwound. Are we closer to the beginning or the end of that process, and how deep will the adjustment be? It's possible that Scott could be right that this will be a shallow downturn, but it is sobering to note from Carl's graph that the equipment industry has not a shallow downturn since 1982.

To: EACarl who wrote (9387)	1/23/2001 8:00:12 AM
From: scott_jiminez	Respond to of 10921

Eric - Good to hear from you. You make some excellent points. I seem to be consistently on the short end of the fact-based, logic-centered analysis. With so many seeing my perspective as bone-headed, there must be an incredible element of truth to it.... I’ll return with some of my own comments later. For now, the logic presented here Message 15227664 contains some of the points forming my POV. In short, there's a reason many institutional investors are not calling this a sucker's rally...and why many self-proclaimed ex-suckers so often find themselves playing water-boy on the sidelines while the action flys past them. BTW, I just traveled through Greensboro on my way from CH to Hawksnest for some downhill. Perhaps we’ll get together at some point. Scott