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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jay M. Harris who wrote (4275)	1/2/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 10921

Jay - <<Intel is more impotant than following the box makers GPMs because of Intel's extremely large market share within the industry. Intel truely reflects the condition of the industry at large being a single product company " in terms of revenue" with a 90% share of Micros.>> As you might expect (since we seem to disagree on almost everything ;)) I disagree. Under ordinary circumstances I might agree, but AMD, which at the beginning of the year had almost none of the market, now has a significant percentage. The managers at Intel would have to be geniuses to have correctly predicted the inventory requirements in that kind of situation. However, having said that, I did recently read an article which talked to several companies that made equipment for the PC market. And they all expressed concern over lack of growth. However, I suspect the article might have been biased, since all of the companies talked to were small companies I had never heard of. Clark PS Did you notice that CompUSA released earnings recently which showed 8.8% growth in same store sales over the year-ago quarter. Not too bad a sign.

To: Jay M. Harris who wrote (4275)	1/2/1998 1:02:00 PM
From: space cadet	Respond to of 10921

Guys, I should have probably mentioned the internet hi-flyers such as yhoo, aol, amzn, etc. Yes they are even more absurdly priced than nvls and amat et al were this past summer. However, I learned the hard way not to short the hi-flyers (I did stupidly put yhoo-kiss that money goodbye). The very fact that the hi-flyers aren't expected to make any real money for years is their strength, believe it or not. When others aren't meeting earnings expectations, as Zeev correctly stated, yhoo et al become places to park their money. But the semi-equipment stocks aren't "story stocks" with fables surrounding them. Investors expect these stocks to earn money, and while they occasionally do drift off the planet like this past summer, they will return to earnings reports every quarter for confirmation. Now to Jay. Great post. I pretty much second what you are saying. I don't think we will see the kinds of valuations we saw last summer for a few years, and perhaps for many many years. My market call is for a strong first quarter and then real weakness. I totally agree about Intel as a leading indicator. No way that the hardware stocks can recover with intel so weak. Even msft, csco, et al IMO will be hard pressed to continue making new highs with intel as crushed as it is these days. If intel has a strong report and rallies I think we will see one of the great rallies of all time... Unfortunately I definitely don't expect that to happen...

To: Jay M. Harris who wrote (4275)	1/2/1998 5:24:00 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 10921

Relative strength of semi-equips: The whole group has been in a horizontal or pennant formation for the last two weeks. This short-term pattern, I think, shows clearly the different long-term outlook for the various companies. I expect the relative performance to be repeated, on a much larger scale, over the next 3 years. ASMLF has done the best, followed by AMAT, KLAC, followed by NVLS, with KLIC lagging. If I was certain I could time the tops and bottoms, I'd buy KLIC, because it has the most variability (544% change from 96 low to 97 high). Since I'm not sure of my ability to do this, I'll hold my AMAT and add KLAC at the bottom. Maybe buy Jan 2001 LEAPS at 35-45 strike price AMAT, when available in July 1998. There is a lot less info available about ASMLF than the others, so I'm not comfortable buying it.