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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Serendipity who wrote (19838)	1/27/1998 4:20:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Well we have almost eaten through 6 7/8 in record time Closed -5/32 at 6 7/8 on 2846500 shares with 1506 trades. The volume is up over a million shares compared to the last week or two. So this qualifies as a move down on volume. I think we can bounce up to 7 (in a Novell typical counter market move should we go down tomorrow) but the inventory is very large at 6 3/4 and the news that people are getting is that MSFT is out to kill NDS. If it can get away with doing it by words so much the cheaper. An apology by the way isn't what MSFT is all about. It wasn't some underling that came up with the NDS non-support message. IT came straight from old ruthless. And a private suit will not do it. Only an anti-trust complaint filed with the Justice Department. But then again what does Novell have a BOD for. I'm not on it. YOU GUYS FIGURE IT OUT. But please do so before MSFT introduces some really nice bugs into NT 5.0 where it "interoperates" with Netware 5.0. Or did I steal the script? Back to the stock price, I'm not sure we will see a bounce. The volumes have been so low that I'm not convinced an oversold condition exists. In fact Novell traded today about half a million shares below what used to be an normal day. We are however getting into some area of movement. Lets toss this scenario out: Bullish if it moves up to 7 and holds for a day. Bearish if it moves up to 7, doesn't hold for even a few hours and then moves down to 6 3/4. Safe bet for tomorrow 6 3/4. ============================== Gee when do you think we will get a BOD meeting, at 6.28? At least when you are brain dead panic is out of the question.

To: Serendipity who wrote (19838)	1/27/1998 5:16:00 PM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

Hi Serendipity, Breaking support on volume and closing on the low looks bad. You have to go back to last summer to find a support level in the low to mid 6s. Moving averages are all down for any length of time you want to look at out to 3 years. Buy and hold is not a good way to play an issue that is trending down, but if you like to trade you can usually sneek in for a quick bite on the bounces. NOVL has a tendency to go down in up markets. When everything else on the screen is showing fat increases, trying to milk NOVL for 1/4-3/8 doesn't look like as much fun. It's when the rest of the market gets ugly that it starts looking like a good place to park some money for short term trades. Making 20-40 cents on 10K shares for a few days work in a down market isn't bad at all. It also tends to go up when the rest of the market gets over bought and over priced. I think we're seeing some short covering balancing out panic selling. I see that Novell has released the second beta for NetWare 5 and are still projecting mid 98 for final shipment. It also looks like they have addressed some of the complaints about the beta 1. Should start seeing the next batch of hopeful investors that are in love with the installed base and billion in cash any time now. At least Novell is going heads up against Microsoft for a change. They may not win but it's nice to see that there is some fight left in them. If they ever get their heads out of that dark, dark place and start spending the money on marketing, that they should have been spending all along, they might even stand a chance of winning. 10-15% of sales is what they should be spending. That's normal maintainance on a healthy business. It would hurt earnings for 1-2 quarters but within 6 months revenue would be way up, even without any new product releases. Microsoft is real vulnerable right now if Novell were to launch a carefully thought out and well executed ad campaigne. The small business section is dead without saturation marketing. Microsoft already has brand recognition, the only way Novell can get it is to pay for it. I'm starting to think about a long position for a short term trade but it still looks too early to me. Gotta wait 'till the plannets line up just right. Regards, Don