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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry J. who wrote (26645)	12/6/1997 8:57:00 PM
From: Sector Investor	Respond to of 61433

<<If nothing else (no aquisition), upgrades are almost a certainty based on confirmation of the numbers, visibility, and improved outlook. A few from larger brokerages should be more than sufficient to propel ASND back to a new base in the low 30's. IMO mid 20's are gone for good.>> Yes Larry, I fully agree with you: Look at this from yeasterday's Motley Fool: "Interestingly, although Ashby had affirmed the fiscal 1998 earnings estimates when he first took the post as CFO weeks ago, many investors had not taken those numbers seriously. Hambrecht & Quist analyst Joe Noel quipped, "There're a lot of people who realized yesterday that Ascend is not going out of business." Ashby was also careful to contrast Ascend's performance with the recent earnings warnings from networks Cabletron (NYSE: CS) and 3Com (Nasdaq: COMS), saying that "business is good." When asked directly about the merger, Ashby refused to comment on any specific partner like Lucent or Northern Telecom (NYSE: NT), saying only, "We are not for sale." " Let's take these separately. First Joel Noel is the analyst who whom Mory had a "disagreement" with regarding the number of RBOCs ASND sells to, so anything positive from him is significant. Second and more importantly, is his statement that there were "a lot of people" who realized yesterday that ASND was not going bankrupt. This seems to me to be an obvious reference to others in the room listening to ASND's briefing. These had to be mostly important investment community people - people who can move ASND's price. I think we can definitely state that ASND turned some kind of corner on Thursday. This "corner" will be followed by another tech event this week, possibly some news from the Worldcom event, updates from analysts just prior to the quiet period, another conference in January just before earnings are out, then probably some product announceements just prior to earnings being announced, followed by "good" earnings ( I think they will exceed modestly), and hopefully an even better conference call. I did not mention analyst upgrades, which may start appearing also while these events are unfolding. Also, short covering has to begin unwinding soon. Finally, I thing Ashby's last statement is significant. I don't believe a buyout is imminent. ASND is in a much better position than most analysts' have believed: TNT problems resolved, sales to Europe resuming, 56K standard near, NTT contract, UUNET contract(s) Worldcom buying ATM equipment, unnamed RBOC also buying, GX-550, DSLTNT, denser RAS products near, voice and video added capabilities, etc. They are about to kick butt big time, IMO.