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Technology Stocks : Adaptec (ADPT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom M who wrote (674)	12/2/1997 4:05:00 PM
From: David Fick	Respond to of 5944

As someone that owns stock in both ADPT and (unfortunately) WDC I would hope that the WDC news is not what is pushing ADPT down. If that is the case then somebody is not paying enough attention to WDC's problems. WDC's problems relate to a huge glut of hard drives (from SEG, QNTM, WDC, Samsung, Maxtor, etc.) in the marketplace which is causing pricing pressures and hence lower profits/earnings. On top of that WDC is currently switching over to a new head technology that has taken longer than expected. IMO this all adds up to big problems for WDC but I don't see the affect on ADPT. Nowhere in any of the bad news coming from the disk drive sector is there any mention of a reduction in demand. Demand is extremely strong, there are just way too many suppliers. If disk drive demand was off I could see how that would affect ADPT since that would probably mean fewer SCSI cards sold. In addition that I know of ADPT has no serious competition and has strong brand name recognition within their markets that creates a pseudo barrier to entry by new companies. With all that said 'the street' may perceive that there is a connection and their perception equates to fact in the stock market whether it is grounded in reality or incorrect logic. I don't know all the particulars of the Altera problems but again I don't see the connection to ADPT. In addition if ADPT was moving down in sympathy with the bad general tech news I would expect to see a drop roughly equivalent to 1x or 2x of the NASDAQ composite drop. The last time I looked the composite index was down a little over 1%. But with an 8% drop in ADPT I think there is something else cooking. I am wondering if there is some clearly bad news for ADPT that has not been released to the general public but the folks in the know have heard already. Two GUESSES I came up with were one or more large insider sales or a large mutual fund manager has decided to liquidate their position in ADPT. Does anyone have access to the latest insider trade information? At this point I believe ADPT is a very strong company and even more important to the shareholders a very strong investment. Until there is some concrete news from the company itself or a related company I am not going to worry (too much) but am still very interested to hear any theories or news anyone else has. Regards, Dave