Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Math Junkie who wrote (47520)	6/1/2001 5:35:15 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

DRAM prices wilt to record lows By Jack Robertson EBN (06/01/01 14:20 p.m. EST) Electronics systems makers may be smarting from excess inventories and weak end demand, but they can be assured of a good deal on DRAM as the price of commodity memory chips plunged this week to record lows. A survey of DRAM sourcing sites found that mainstream 128Mbit chips dropped to less than $3 each on certain Asian spot markets, about the same level at which 64Mbit devices were trading only five months ago. That precipitous decline prompted some chip makers to proclaim this the worst-ever pricing crash the memory market has witnessed. “It's never been this bad,” said Jim Sogas, vice president of sales and marketing at Elpida Memory Co. Inc., San Jose, summing up the vendor viewpoint. At the opposite pole, customers can look to the DRAM sector to deliver bargain-basement deals, which show no signs of abating any time soon. DRAM prices will stabilize only when demand picks up in the PC space and in networking and other communications end-equipment markets, “and right now that is anyone's guess,” said Sherry Garber, an analyst at Semico Research Corp., Phoenix. Sogas called SDRAM demand forecasts “elusive.” Indeed, though they are already at historic lows, SDRAM prices will continue to fall, according to Grant Johnson of Converge Inc., a Peabody, Mass., online trading exchange. “The PC and telecom markets are depressed and they aren't buying the quantities of chips that fabs can turn out,” Johnson said. “Yet chip companies are forced to continue producing at high levels to pay for the depreciation and investment costs of the fabs. “I talk to our product managers on the trading floor, and they tell me this is the lowest-priced market they've ever seen. And they are expecting it to get worse,” Johnson said. On the spot market, 128Mbit SDRAM was selling for $3 to $3.25, with some Asian commodity quotes below that level, according to Johnson. Sogas suspects that the lowest prices could represent one-time panic sales of off-brand parts, but agreed that prices for SDRAM will continue to plumb new depths. Even OEM contract prices are in the $3 to $3.50 range for 128Mbit devices, Sogas added. Analysts and chip makers alike blamed cascading memory chip prices on producers and customers unloading excess inventories into the spot market. Merrill Lynch Securities last week reported that suppliers' SDRAM inventories grew to five to six weeks, larger than most vendors want. The rock-bottom prices could give a send-off to Intel Corp.'s upcoming launch of its SDRAM-enabled Brookdale chipset by giving its Pentium 4 processor a low-cost memory alternative to Direct Rambus DRAM. More than 100 Taiwan-made Pentium 4 motherboards are expected to be shown this week at the Computex show in Taipei using the Brookdale chipset with SDRAM. Plunging prices also could help Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which uses third-party chipsets and its own AMD 760 chipset to connect SDRAM to its Athlon and Duron processors.

To: Math Junkie who wrote (47520)	6/1/2001 5:51:02 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Richard, Both you and I suffer from a lack of confidence. Given the market over the last 15 months, it is quite understandable. Limit orders may be a solution for both of us. As Jerome wrote to me in a PM, i paraphrase, stay off the computer for a couple of weeks and remember what it was like before bill gates. mike

To: Math Junkie who wrote (47520)	6/1/2001 6:25:08 PM
From: Tito L. Nisperos Jr.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

RE "Your first thought is usually the correct one." Looks like that would have applied to your initial plan to sell at 52, Yes it's true! Most of my successful moves are Instinctive. Let me rewind what happened, no calculations involved just the best guess on the Targets: --- Target = 56 --- the stock hit the Highs for 3 successive days with 56.85. 55.80 then 56.56 never getting higher than 56.85 until I set another target at 58. Then the Highs for 2 successive days were 58 and 58.49. The other day while the stock was threatening to go down to 47 and it seemed everybody was resigned to it --- suddenly I started buying with a target of 52! I don't know, of course the traders are not reading my posts that they find it good to follow my guidelines... or did I stumble into something while doing Humorous Posts? I guess I won't change what I'm doing (don't fix if ain't broke) while something good is happening --- for the benefit of the Thread ...