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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just_Observing who wrote (53713)	4/17/1998 8:51:00 AM
From: Thomas G. Busillo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Just Observing, how's this for a possible scenario: 1. Your broker's right - Kurlak didn't make the "INTC could possibly fall to 60" call in his morning call 4/15/98 2. Kurlak is right - his denial over the "60" figure, a denial which your broker says he made in a morning call w/ brokers the following day, 4/16/98, is in fact accurate. 3. CNBC is right - Kurlak did say he saw INTC as possibly falling to 60. How can assumptions 1, 2, and 3 all be right? One way... As far as the "60" goes, there's an easy way to say INTC could possibly fall to 60 without ever mentioning the number 60. Don't talk in absolute price terms; talk in percentage terms. For example, we see potential downside of 20%, or some variation. That would very easily dovetail with the non-response response given by Merrill Lynch on 4/15/98 (Reuters piece, 4/15/98, in which an unspecified individual in his office told Reuters that Kurlak did see possible downside, but declined to give a price target). As far as the "ML doesn't give price targets on 3's", I'd ask "what's a price target?" It was widely reported that Kurlak said he thought MU could fall to 20. At the time of that call, to my knowledge, he had MU as 3-3 - both intermediate-term and long-term neutral. Also, was there a subsequent communication between Kurlak and clients later in the day? As poor as CNBC's editorial judgement is at times, and as often as they come off as a bunch of college communications majors playing around instead of a serious news source, and even though they're really pushing the ethical boundaries with some of their Dow Jones cross-promotional crap, I'd have a hard time believing they could be so blatantly snookered into giving a report. What exactly gave CNBC the impression that Kurlak made the call? Someone had to have conveyed something to them. And they apparently felt comfortable enough with their initial source and their corroborating sources to run the story. Could there have been a second call later in the day, one in which ML brokers in the regionals were not aware of? Merrill Lynch and Tom Kurlak should come out and quash the story if it is false, as opposed to denying it in an internal call to the salesforce. You've got all these news outlets that have run the story. Some, like Reuters, gave the source as a CNBC report. Others didn't: Merrill Lynch's Thomas Kurlak lowered his 1998 earnings estimates and said he expects Intel's price to drop to $60 a share in the next six months That's from CBS/DBC. Bloomberg also picked it up, as I'm sure many others did. I still think there's a story there, but since CNBC producers are reportedly now sitting in on the Wall Street Journal's daily editorial meetings (source: Business Week, 2/23/98, page 39) I certainly wouldn't expect see anything in the WSJ. I'm not looking for a "conspiracy" here (honest <g>). Just confirmation of the accuracy of a report that took roughly $3.79 BILLION in market-cap off of Intel in a 25-minute period. I'd argue that if there are discrepancies appearing to be coming out after the fact, even for those who put $$$ before principle, 3.79 BILLION makes it worth asking. Good trading, Tom