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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (136833)	6/6/2001 7:30:45 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

"seemed Intel was going up $10 a day" RE:"As for moving forward, Intel is proceeding on several fronts. As a shareholder for 27 years, I'm relatively satisfied." "I suppose so...<G> I can remember back in the 80's when it seemed Intel was going up $10 a day. I don't see that kind of growth again unless they find some new market to conquer. " This doesn't match my memories AT ALL. I remember years and years of stagnation in the stock price...though not the kind of stagnation the folks with AMD stock saw, fortunately. (Paul's "profile"--click on his name--shows the trend clearly.) finance.yahoo.com is a useful chart to look at. It doesn't go back to the 1980-85 period, but I can assure you that Intel didn't go up much during those dismal years. A digression: I was at Intel for 12 years, from 1974 to 1986, and I can only remember a handful of _good_ years. 1973-4 was a terrible recession, 1978-81 was the oil embargo/"national malaise"/high interest rate train wreck (and the Japanese companies were kicking our butts around 1980-84), and then my last recesssion, in 1985-86. Which leaves only a few really good periods, from a chip industry perspective: 1976-79, 1983-85. Some overlap with the recession/bad years, as expected. And during the _good_ years, the pressure to grow and expand was horrible...I remember wasting endless hours in "Facilities" meetings, arranging for moves of my labs. And endless jockeying to hire more people. But I didn't experience the "Golden Years" of 1988-2000, where there were no national recessions and where Intel grew without much interruption. I saw those years as a holder of Intel stock...the best place to watch from! The explosive growth period I remember best seemed to have started in late '94, right about the time of the FDIV problem. In other words, with the Pentium. (An investor friend of mine, who runs a major hedge fund, asked me how bad I thought the FDIV problem really was. It was on CNN every night, even. Based on my discussions with Paul Engel, and my own estimates, I figured Intel would weather the storm very well. Paul came up with the best line: "This puts Intel's name and the name of the Pentium out there to everyone...the best advertising Intel has ever gotten." My hedge fund friend decided to take a flyer away from his usual investments and he bought a lot of Intel LEAPs. Several months later I saw him and he said he'd made $500K on a $25K investment! This was because Intel began a rapid price rise in early '95 as the FDIV crisis passed and as Pentium sales began to mount rapidly. He still thanks me for educating him on why the FDIC problem would not kill Intel the way so many pundits were claiming it would. "OTOH, this doesn't make them a great investment by a long shot. Certainly there are better pickings out there. So find us the next Intel." I like Oracle a lot. I bought them in 1995 on the basis that data base technology was one of those "core building blocks" of the Internet and because they'd had a real product for a lot of years, with no good clones and no prospects for clones. They've tumbled a lot. Right now, I like Apple. I first bought the stock the day after the Mac was unveiled in 1984. Instead of buying a Mac, as I really wanted to do, I earmarked that $2500 for Apple. I later bought more. It went up and down. I sold most of my Apple at $105 last year, luckily missing the big tumble. I started buying back at $20. (This is not an Apple thread, so I won't go into details about why I like the prospects. In a nutshell, they seem to be firing on all cylinders. I can say more if there's interest.) --Tim May