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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Return to Sender who wrote (3981)	7/14/2002 9:46:39 PM
From: Donald Wennerstrom	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95464

I thought the L.A. Times had a good front page article on the economy today. The article can be found at: latimes.com but registration may be required to view it. I will show a few excerpts from the article below - any highlights are mine. <<Markets Nearing Crucial Stage Wall Street: Persistently declining stock values may trigger greater economic and budget woes. But some investors see a choice time to buy. By TOM PETRUNO, Times Staff Writer <<The stock market's latest slide to five-year lows is raising new risks for the economy, government coffers and foreigners' willingness to invest in U.S. assets. It's also confounding market pros--and millions of individual investors--who now are focused on trying to pinpoint the end of stocks' long decline, in the hope of reaping huge rewards when prices finally turn.>> <<On Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget forecast a $165-billion federal deficit for fiscal 2002 and warned that "the stock market and the capital gains receipts it generates have become more important than ever to the federal budget outlook." The implication is that, without a market rebound, the deficit could balloon further. The same may be true in states such as California, where a collapse in capital gains taxes has helped create a $23.6-billion budget gap.>> <<As the worries pile up, however, so too does the sense that the stock market may at last be nearing rock bottom. Historically, that has often been the case: Bear markets end when investors' mood is at its gloomiest. And the rallies that follow usually are explosive. But on 21st century, information-overloaded Wall Street, everyone knows, or thinks they know, how to measure when sentiment hits that critical point that signals it's time to buy shares. And that's part of the problem: Investors, bullish and bearish, are intently watching the same technical indicators, and in so doing they may be skewing the readings of some of those indicators--further handicapping efforts to get a clear view of whether the market is ready to turn.>> <<"Everyone is a market technician today," said economist Paul Kasriel at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago. "And everyone is waiting for [other investors'] capitulation to signal it's time to buy.">> <<Barton Biggs, a veteran investment strategist at brokerage Morgan Stanley in New York, who was a voice of caution during the late 1990s market surge, last week wrote an essay titled "Don't Bet Against America." In it, he said that "at today's prices, I do think that investors can make money in the short run, and this is no time to be selling stocks.">> <<The Nasdaq composite index, dominated by the nation's technology giants, fell 5.2% last week to 1,373.50. Nasdaq, now at levels last seen in May 1997, has fallen 73% from its March 2000 peak, a decline that is nearing the 90% drop in major market indexes in the Depression years of 1929-32.>> <<The Fed chief on Tuesday morning will deliver his semiannual economic report to Congress. In testimony before a Senate committee, Greenspan is expected to sound upbeat. And although he isn't expected to offer a definitive view on whether stocks are overpriced or underpriced, he is likely to sound reassuring about the market's long-term health, and may suggest that there is a "disconnect" between the market's slide and what is happening in the economy, analysts say. "I see him painting the glass as half-full," Goldman Sachs' Dudley said.>> <<Many analysts, however, believe the stock market's main problem is unrelated to the economy. They say stocks simply remain too high-priced relative to expected earnings, despite the plunge since 2000. The blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 index has dropped nearly 40% from its peak in March 2000, yet the average stock in the index is priced at about 19 times this year's expected earnings per share, by many Wall Street estimates. That is far above the historical average price-to-earnings ratio of about 14.>> <<"I still think we're in this environment where people think another bull market is right around the corner," said Kevin Marder, strategist at brokerage Ladenburg Thalmann in Los Angeles. "What we need to see is more people disgusted and believing that stocks will never come back in their lifetimes.">>