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

To: willcousa who wrote (177169)	2/29/2004 6:42:02 PM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 186894

Probably the Indian Rupee & Chinese Renminbi. everbank.com ? But China isn't open - you can't exactly do a conversion (it's illegal on the open market), so am dubious of Everbank's so-called Renminbi CD. One can do conversions through the Bank of China, when in China, and you have to hold onto your receipt if you want to convert this money back into USD. India passed a new law last month allowing for more currency transactions (around two Lakhs per year). But their stock market imposes a selling limit of a lakh per day so it can take months to get out of a position, not seconds. Subject 54064 Subject 53540 But both have experienced a recent bubble, similar to ours in 2000. On a humorous note, here's what one rather witty poster said about inflation (of goods) and deflation (of labor): The govt will average the prices out and claim prices are stable. BLS's delay in releasing the inflation statistics certainly has grabbed some people's attention. On a more serious note, given that Intel generates 70%+ of its revenue overseas, I believe this gives us a large amount of protection against USD (I'm guessing). Two years ago, I looked into purchasing some Euros. Instead, I held onto all the INTC (and even increased my INTC position thru cov calls), and INTC has risen more than the Euro during this time. Owning INTC appears to give a person the benefit (and risk) of having an investment in an international country. (Intel said they keep all their overseas money in USD, so their cash-on-hand is in USD currency. But their new international revenue is paid by international customers in international currency, I assume, so if USD drops, the goods are cheaper so more goods get sold.) Regards, Amy J

To: willcousa who wrote (177169)	2/29/2004 7:27:17 PM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 186894

Speaking about (Chinese) Asian currency, a friend of mine was telling me about the Vietnamese gangs in Silicon Valley that apparently seek out Asians who have mirrors on their doors (similar to what Solectron has). The mirrors are suppose to ward off ghosts and bad luck and the like, though ironically, instead it lets all the Vietnamese gangs know where the Asians live. Some certain types of new immigrant Asians foolishly keep gold in their homes, and so they become targets to these Vietnamese gangs who rob their homes and take their gold. Once in awhile you'll read about someone that was killed, simply because they didn't want to declare their money and keep it in a bank. Really foolish. Certain new immigrants don't report the theft, my friend says because their money probably came from dubious sources or was never reported in the first place as an import to the government, he believes. They don't realize their life is more important than money. So this post isn't totally off-topic, when Intel's chips became more valuable than gold, gangs started targeting Intel chips as a more favorable target than gold, so they started targeting distributors. One Wyle rep was telling me about how their company uses armored vehicles if they have to deliver components to an assembly house. At our startup, I created the rule that says, you cannot store any components (nor finished product) onsite. It has to remain at a different company, not ours, at the assembly houses where they are set up to handle this. Assembly houses will ship directly to the customer so companies have no need to store inventory. The biggest theives of components is one foreign government that holds USA approved export shipments of goods, and this foreign country will charge you a few thousand dollars (I call it bribe money, they call it legitimate customs fees, yeah right) if you want to get components released to your overseas site for RND test. The overseas govt customs agents will claim you can get a refund on the money (because components are used for RND not for commercial), but I can tell you, it's been about half a decade and we still have not received our money back from the foreign government, even though all appropriate papers were filed. So, it is now obvious, it was actually bribe money galore. It really ticks me off. And there's no recourse, so you just lose thousands of dollars. Multiply that by all the startups and that's not pocket change. Fortunately, this happened only once to us. Our overseas site eventually threatened something to the overseas govt in customs that somehow protects us from the overseas govt forcing bribes (not sure what they said). Regards, Amy J