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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CMason who wrote (2729)	2/4/1998 12:02:00 AM
From: Death Sphincter	Respond to of 10309

i've followed several companies that have bought out little guys for cash and then had the write-off for the Quarter. one, Macafee, now NETA, did it many times, the write-offs were "one-time charges" and never affected the price of the stock when earnings came out. i don't believe these write-offs will affect anything if the primary earnings outperform the estimates. seems to me that the street is watching WIND because it is still trading at a premium to projected growth(which has always been a low prediction) and numerous tech stocks with high PE's have missed this quarter, therefore, a sort of nervous "death watch" is going on. management has been exceptional in "guiding" numbers and controlling earnings to avoid huge surprises and subsequent irrational "whipsaws". recent comments by the company lead me to believe that we will see the routine $.02 "beat the street" earnings...it's like a page from MSFT(minus $40 gazillion). all-in-all it is hard to find a time when WIND was $10 under their 52 week high with only 3 weeks to earnings and the price DID NOT rise on anticipation of earnings. i'm am one of those foolish traders...and have done very well with this company playing up and down...have been accumulating in the low 30's and also play options(OHH SHAME ON ME, i don't buy and hold forever!). BUT todays action was so ODD that i didn't buy any March Calls...i had planned on doing that at $35.50. have plenty of stock right now and will watch tomorrow and next few days. somebody dumped a bunch of shares today at what appeared to be bid or less and it kind of spooked me away from the high risk of options for the time being. we will see. good luck! carl

To: CMason who wrote (2729)	2/4/1998 12:03:00 AM
From: carolyn walder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

I think that the drop today was more a reaction to Wind's announcement yesterday of the acquisition of Objective Software (which will also be charged to 4th Q earnings). This makes the second charge to earnings (about 13.7 million total, I recall) for this quarter. My two cents...My (and others on this thread as well) observations of WIND's management is that they seem to attempt to report a CONSISTENT increase in earnings every quarter - it has become very predictable (1-2 cents over consensus estimate). My guess would be that revenue is flowing in faster than can be accounted for in this model. If they can't add to deferred revenue they need a way to reduce the earnings this quarter - so they buy a couple of companies and charge them to earnings (note that they announced these acquisitions at the very end of the quarter when the numbers would be known). If these assumptions are correct it would explain why they did not pay for them out of the pot of money that was supposed to be used to pay for acquisitions (the convertible bond $). Am I out to lunch or does this make sense to anyone else? Am I just thinking too hard?! Any thoughts anyone?...Allen?... Carolyn