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

To: michael97123 who wrote (15236)	5/18/2004 6:56:44 PM
From: Donald Wennerstrom	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95718

<<Do we buy them and hold them, naysayers be damned?>> That's a hard one to answer when the 20 or so analysts are "all over the place" in what they expect in the next year or two for AMAT(and other semi-equips as well). All investors are going to have to try and do their own analysis to find "the right path" in terms of timing their investments in the semi-equip area. I certainly haven't done very well in that arena. Let's just take AMAT as an example. From First Call, as reported over the weekend on this thread, the mean target price, consensus of 17 analysts, within the next 12 months is 28.82 with the high value being 40 and the low value being 21 - that is essentially a 2 to 1 spread in estimates over a relatively short 12 month period. The dichotomy in earnings estimates for "this year" and "next year" is also large. Average consensus estimates are 0.80(27 estimates) and 1.14(23 estimates) respectively. Low estimates for each year are 0.66 and 0.89, while high estimates are 0.74 and 1.38 respectively. The spread of "next year" estimated performance is very wide - which leads to a lot of volatility. Don