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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gopher Broke who wrote (60176)	10/25/2001 1:47:13 PM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 275872

Aching for AMD - By James J. Cramer You know I am always searching for bargains, endlessly hunting for something that seems cheap. I am looking for stocks that are discounting the bad and not considering the good. I am looking for stocks where the long shroud of pessimism has created opportunity. And I keep coming back to AMD (AMD:Nasdaq - news - boards) from the SOX index piece that I did. I felt that originally, while cheap, AMD didn't have a catalyst to get past being cheap. I also have been so Intel (INTC:Nasdaq - news - boards)-biased by my history that I haven't given the company its due. Earlier this week, when I said that I didn't want to sell tech any more, I refused to say I would buy any. (Of course, the eternal believers took that as a clarion call to buy.) But if we keep coming down, it is a stock like AMD that I will have to buy. AMD has lowered expectations, a great balance sheet (that is about to get better when it calls its convertible preferred), a billion bucks in cash, a buyback for 4% of its shares and a series of products that is stronger than Intel's by a series of important benchmarks. More important, it is worth more than it is selling for. The company has plowed in $6 billion to build the best fabs to produce microprocessors that people regard as extremely competitive vs. Intel. Yet the whole company is valued at only $7 billion. If you consider the capital infrastructure for microprocessors and the cash on hand, anything else you get is for free. That means you get AMD's considerable flash business -- second only to Intel's with 14.2% share -- and its $800 million in research and development spending, not to mention a massive amount of patents, for free. In other words, let's say AMD has a horrid quarter (which it might, given the downturn in tech), you would just buy more AMD if it got hit because it is so darned cheap. You can't say that about any of the other SOX stocks. So do you buy AMD stock right here, right now? How about this? How about if this stock trades to $20, we make it an Action Alert buy. Until then, we wait. Then why bother to write this piece now? Because I am trying to show you how I am warming up to the right tech stocks that are cheap. More important, it is definitely too late to sell AMD. This is one that can be kept and owned and might actually go up this year if things simply stabilize. I like that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- James J. Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com.