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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (12199)	11/25/2004 9:18:15 AM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25522

RE: " You are aware, I trust, that the whole chart merely reflects the choice of the starting point and starting price." Not true. I could have picked ANY of the nulls in this chart going back to 1998: bigcharts.marketwatch.com There was a null in late 2000 that I bought (and sold the shares in 2001 for a 60% gain) another null in 2001 another null in 2002 and a third and final null in 2003. EVERYONE knows AMAT is a good company. (I own it) Few follow Lam. Lam also has a much smaller market cap. Given those two "features" you can expect Lam's stock to have higher volatility. Higher volatility means you have the opportunity to make much more money with my methods (or those of the AIM folks) What you can see from the chart is the market finally giving Lam credit for gaining market share and having a good cost model in this downturn. Its price was back to even with your three in October 2002, but it has GREATLY outperformed since then. NVLS has been a major laggert, as I predicted might happen, from trying to digest SFAM. So here we are with a chart only back to 2002 and it shows the same thing as the chart back to 1998: Lam outperformance. bigcharts.marketwatch.com Since the Oct 02 bottom, LRCX is up about 275% MXIM is up about 100% Nasdaq Comp is up about 85% AMAT is up about 60% and NVLS is up 40% ONLY MXIM has outperformed the broader Nasdaq Composite index since the October 2002 bottom which I believe reflects the relative over valuation of your stocks when the market bottomed. If I want to buy an individual stock that under performs the Nasdaq, I'd buy GE which pays a very nice dividend since it doesn't fleece investors to line the pockets of its insiders from stock options. Oh yeah, I did buy GE earlier this year and it is up 15%. Maxim is down since then. Again, I am not saying your companies are bad or your strategy won't make money in the long term. What I am saying is you have not been rewarded with higher returns for holding individual stocks that are more risky these past two or three years. When did you put your money back into your stocks? If you can rely on your great market timing skills to get out at the top again then you don't need to buy the stocks that offer better value and give better returns, or have higher volatility so we have more room to error on buying and selling points. FWIW, one reason I started buying LRCX in 1997 and 1998 was etch. I used to design ICs. I noticed that the number of intercommect layers was growing as chips got more complex. More layers means more etchers to avoid those steps being bottlenecks. Masks would also be in higher demand but I was never impressed with any particular company and when the merger sent much of the US production to Europe via ASML, I decided to NOT buy the stock because of European labor laws that make it harder to show a profit. That might have been a mistake as ASML has done quite well, just not as good as LRCX bigcharts.marketwatch.com so I don't feel bad missing that opportunity. That chart shows ASML up about 185% since Oct 2002. Happy Thanksgiving!

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (12199)	11/25/2004 1:10:31 PM
From: 16yearcycle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

Cary, I am embarrassed to admit that I look at charts frequently and am pretty good at pattern recognition. Indeed, I am a legend in my own mind. The chart that Kirk posted on lam vs the others is interesting. What is most interesting about it is that lam hasn't come down as it always has before, to tag the chart lines of the others, and indeed may be turning back up. What could this mean, if anything? One inference would be that it is an excellent example of what you are describing: we are entering a new phase where the past boom and bust cycles have been toned down if not eliminated, and therefore the action of the stock price of lam will no longer reflect this excessive volatility. We might conclude from this chart, posted to prove that lam will outperform because it has before, that this is the time to steer clear from playing the klic's and lrcx's of the world, and stay with the most fundamentally sound of the companies