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To: Earlie who wrote (112495)	7/13/2001 7:04:30 AM
From: robnhood	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Fleck's piece is free tonight, so read about MU... Posted By: amarksp Date: Friday, 13 July 2001, at 3:28 a.m. In Response To: MU - DRAM prices down 1% + tonight.... (amarksp) You can read about Fleck's opinion on MU and ALTR here: capitalstool.com

To: Earlie who wrote (112495)	7/13/2001 8:18:43 AM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	Respond to of 436258

not a problem. it's print specific.

To: Earlie who wrote (112495)	7/13/2001 10:38:32 AM
From: Ken98	Respond to of 436258

$3.35B 13-day repo today.

To: Earlie who wrote (112495)	7/13/2001 11:06:42 AM
From: Perspective	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 436258

Earlie, HB, Patron, anyone - I know this is so passe, but I've been reading balance sheets, and I'm curious: I've started thinking like a fractional owner of a business again (gulp), and it would seem that a simple way of capturing a company's performance, rather than attempting to make sense of the ludicrous pro-forma EPS reports, would be to simply look at rates of change in "net equity", where I define "net equity" as total shareholder equity minus paid-in capital. (Does this have an economics-world name that I'm missing here?) They are two readily available lines in the balance sheet, and it seems like something that can't be warped too easily by any of the gimmicks that are in vogue right now. For instance, if you look at MU, you see that equity increased from 2.7B to 4.0B in FY99, but paid-in capital increased from 0.6B to 1.9B. Hence, my figure stayed flat at 2.1B over the year. Regardless of what they said in EPS reports, they did not generate any equity that year, and that is the ultimate measure of success for a corporation, correct? In FY00, these numbers increased to 6.4B and 2.9B respectively, so net equity increased from 2.1B to 3.5B, ie they generated 1.4B in shareholder equity that year. In the first half of FY01, they have increased shareholder equity from 6.4B to 7.4B, but only because they have increased paid-in capital from 2.9B to 3.7B. Net equity increased from 3.5B to 3.7B. So, for FY99, FY00, and FY01 (the first half), they have generated 0.0B, 1.4B, and 0.2B. So, during the ten quarters surrounding the PEAK of the tech mania, they managed to generate a grand total of 1.6B in equity. For that, Wall Street is paying $23B. That's 16X the peak year of equity generation, and obviously much more than that if you consider average equity generation by smoothing out the deeply cyclical changes in their earnings. Have I screwed anything up here? Is there a better way to do this? Suggestions, comments, improvements encouraged. BC

To: Earlie who wrote (112495)	7/13/2001 3:49:22 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 436258

The Year of Anti-Tech Pull Up Your SOX and Get Ready to Rock By Thomas Kurlak Special to TheStreet.com 7/13/01 10:57 AM ET URL: thestreet.com Let's go out on a limb and make a forecast. The semiconductor recovery has already started, and by the fourth quarter, analysts will be confirming it. How can I be so sure? And why isn't it apparent to everyone? Well, most people seem too focused on second-quarter sales and their projected 25% plunge from the first quarter. This decline is what most analysts are now forecasting, helped by recent management guidance. Few comments (with some exceptions) are directed at what's happened to orders. Pinpointing a Bottom The total collapse of orders in the first quarter was the cycle bottom, in my opinion. The subsequent collapse of sales in the second quarter was readily predictable from first-quarter orders. And during the second quarter, orders have stabilized and even increased in some instances, especially as the quarter ended. Information I have gathered lately also supports a better tone in the Far East PC sector. The current downward acceleration of sales is the inverse of 18 months ago, when sales accelerated upward while orders had already softened. And because orders are no longer collapsing, we can be pretty sure that inventories are nearly reduced to normal levels relative to normal end-market sales. Inventories don't need to be depleted before a recovery starts, just reduced. So if we look back in 12 months at a track of quarterly orders, I'm confident we'll see that a bottom occurred during the first quarter of 2001 and that every quarter afterward was higher. This seems to be why the semiconductor stocks are not making new lows despite repeated Wall Street warnings about second-quarter earnings. The low in the SOX (the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index) was made with the low in first-quarter orders, or actually when those orders were revealed in first-quarter conference calls in early April. A Season to Turn? Let's worry a little less about this earnings season for semiconductor stocks and remember that the market is always erratic in the summer. It seems like every year we hear about a summer rally, and every year it never quite measures up to the advance billing. A lot of investors, including some of the old pros interviewed in the recent Barron's Roundtable discussion, are afraid the summer malaise will be followed by an autumn decline in stocks as the consumer retrenches. Yet housing and car sales look surprisingly strong. Confidence is damaged, but it's not collapsing. Clearly, Wall Street's excesses in the bubble, pushing too much money into the New Economy, are now having a real-world impact on technology workers who are being laid off or fired. But I don't hear of autoworkers, construction workers, oil-rig workers or utility workers getting fired. It seems that Main Street has enjoyed watching the demise of the dot-com millionaires and their Wall Street bankers, but it hasn't been hit as hard as in past slowdowns. This "recession" has had less impact on the broader economy than most economists are willing to admit. Yes, the semiconductor industry, as a feeder of parts to the overhyped Internet/communications frenzy, is now down sharply. But semiconductors always find a way to recover because they are so fundamental to electronics, and electronics are fundamental to the economy. In hindsight, we should see that the semiconductor industry was way overordered, then way underordered, and by some time next year, back on its long-term trend of 15% growth. And I am confident that the Federal Reserve, with its good 20-year track record of directing the economy, can strengthen things fairly soon. Indeed, a head of steam is already building up, but it's not yet been detected by most forecasters except the stock market. So don't miss the next train. It's in the station, but the good seats are filling up. And remember to go first-class. That means names such as Intel (INTC:Nasdaq), Texas Instruments (TXN:NYSE), Analog Devices (ADI:NYSE) and Linear Technology (LLTC:Nasdaq).