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Non-Tech : The Official Guide To GOOFS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (3371)	6/16/2001 5:26:20 AM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3539

RE values are being eroded from the bottom up. So far this down turn has taken its toll on those least able to cope with it. The line workers and the semi-skilled. If you want to buy a home in the $2M- $20M range there is probably still some competition but the trailer parks are being emptied out and everything's up for sale with no buyers visible. Still commuting pressure easing is a pleasant relief. RE values shot up very quickly in the late 90s. Things are a bit less than double what they were asking in the 1989 balloon so we are now letting air out of this latest balloon. Companies have been furloughing workers in creative ways with forced vacations required, some down days with all employees off with no pay, etc. Layoffs are the happening thing, belt tightening is running rampant. The "successful" companies are the ones that find imaginative ways to tell their workaday peoples that the annual pay raise is being postponed indefinitely this year. I'm starting to notice more and more vacant properties and more permanent "for lease" signs in my daily wanderings. A stranger in a trenchcoat at the light rail stop approaches and in a hushed whisper says, "Hey, Buddy! Wanna buy a nice CISCO building, real cheap?" To which I just say, "Scram Sam, there's guys like you at every stop". Its the sign of the times... Things are looking pretty dark, Greenspan is just a yawn. What's he gonna do? Throw another 1/2% token at the problem? I don't have the faith that you espouse in Intel. The RMBS play looks mighty dangerous to me. I think they've been pretty much eviscerated. My basic problem with Intel lies with the leadership. I remember working for Craig Barrett. Well at least my manager reported to him. And more to the point I remember going before the gauntlet, trying to get funding for things with Andy and Gordon holding forth in the capital review meetings. That original leadership (Noyce, Moore, Grove) was rather inspired. Those guys were real risktakers and creators, people with a shared, inspired vision and the means to execute. I'm quite remote from all that now but I suspect Intel has morphed into a giant political Machiavellian opera where image and style have long since supplanted substance. I just don't "get it" anymore. Where is the market that will sustain 300mm sourced superchip pentium killers? Do they think corporate America will engage in yet another round of PC upgrades? Do they really think this market will respond like drug-crazed addicts desperate for another PC fix? I find this the epitome of top-o-the-mushroom thinking. Everybody has got their commuter-PC Another PC is like another car in the drive way, where do you find room to park it? What they will inspire is just at the lunatic fringe where a few extra giga-Hertz still really means something other than a yawn. It'll play well at Comdex but the hordes will not be there when the sales machinery gets going. And as Intel goes, so goes the infrastructure. Look at the INTC longer term chart. They are having trouble holding 30, and they will eventually take their buddies with them (RMBS and AMAT, MU and the overseas memory competition, the board stuffers, the box makers, yada, yada, yada). When they've spent their wad this year, I just don't think there will be another $5B big ones to back up their investments in equipment next year. How could there be? Where will it come from? What will Amat and the others do? The hollowing out of tech margins will continue. That's why I see the fringe chip makers the only safe play. Those companies that sell in the mile wide one foot deep market space like the analog houses. LLTC, MXIM and the unmentionable one. One thing is certain. When the turn comes, and it always does, it will be like a high-G turn at first, followed by a feeling like the brakes were slammed on again and a ride on a very bumpy road. As this is when the JIT mentality will finally discover its achilles heel. With the inventories of all the giant companies leaned out to the extreme, there won't be any slop in the pipeline to quickly fill their needs. They will be crying for supply and they just won't get it. The upstream manufacturers will have been so hollowed out they will as a whole be unable to respond. So lean and so mean as to be meager. Better to stick with the genome, at least there is a future over there. The long march toward androidism will prevail.

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (3371)	6/17/2001 1:38:09 AM
From: Michael Sphar	Respond to of 3539

Hi Fred, I may have somewhat disconcerting news for ya, I applied my highly proprietary forward looking analysis to one of your picks and it told me to sell it off today, with the expectation to buy it back no sooner than 10-Oct. I tried tweaking it with some more bullish slant and it only pulled the buy back signal in to 19-Sep, it was still giving a solid sell signal for now. The stock is IGEN. Hope your okay with it. I don't like seeing things that point to mid Oct. Something's been lurking in the back of my mind about Oct ever since 1987. I just don't like that time of the year from a stock perspective. With this economy spiraling down the way it is, and with Japan and its zero cost of money stock model preceding it by ten years and still no recovery over there, I sure hope the powers that be in Wash, Wallstreet and elsewhere get their stuff together and forestall some big emotionally cleansing sort of thing from happening on the big board and to the rest of the stocks. We've had enough catharsis with the Naz death spiral from last year, we don't need its big brother following along for a major league dip taking the rest of the players with it.