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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pass pass who wrote (3663)	2/5/2001 11:43:22 AM
From: David E. Taylor	Respond to of 6784

Pass: Darned if I know. I was sure the slow rise over the last few weeks was going to take us back over $30, and that we'd be around the $38 IPO price in another few weeks. So something's going on, and it may be just the lack of news or new product releases and a corresponding lack of interest in and buyers of the stock. But we've turned over around 420 million shares since earnings 12/20/0, and the fact that PALM has essentially gone nowhere in that time is indicative IMO of some major changeover in the institutional ownership, with net more selling than buying. PALM had major institutional ownership, well over 60% as of the 9/30/00 quarter end. A lot of that ownership was obtained by institutional buying of COMS prior to the 7/27/00 PALM spin off, when COMS could be bought between $38 and $50. Back out the COMS part at say $18 (those same institutions for the most part don't own COMS any more) and their PALM cost basis is between $14 and $22. So we could be seeing the effects of some lightening up of those holdings as those same institutions sell off some PALM (with a decent gain despite the decline) to put the money to work elsewhere. I thought of doing the same thing myself at the beginning of the year, but a couple of PALM head fakes stopped me from doing anything, and now it's as good a "hold" as anything else I have. At least I'm still above my cost basis with PALM, which is more than I can say for most of the positions I am holding, though when I look back at the $40-$60 range we were in when the market was selling off over the last Q of 2000, it sure feels like I'm way under water! We might get some idea of what the institutions have been doing as the 13f reports for the 12/31/00 quarter end trickle in over the next few weeks, even if they don't tell us what's been going on for the last few days. Heavy volume this morning is hopefully the sign of a bottom and a recovery from here back to more a more reasonable level of $30-$40, though WLD would probably say that is "more overvalued"!. But IMO it's going to take new product announcements, OS 4.0, evidence of strong sales and market share, and other similar stuff to get the interest back in the stock.