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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (20862)	6/26/1998 1:39:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 70976

... the PSR tends to be backward looking, while stock prices themselves attempt to reflect future prospects. I'm curious as to what method you feel is more appropriate than, for instance, use of PSRs. Personally, I prefer PSR as a starting point. I also look at the run rate (MRQ * 4) as an indicator of the growth rate and possibly a red flag. I also like to look at Enterprise Value (subtracting net cash from market cap) as a further check on how reasonable the current price is. Relative strength is another key factor. ROE and its trend should be considered, at least relative to other industry players. My point to Jacob was that if the street takes the PSR up this year, perhaps its based upon facts that are not yet obvious to him. A PSR of 4.6 or 6.4 or whatever can be reduced if the price goes down (in which case shorting is a winning tactic) or if sales goes up (in which case "shorting" could be deadly to one's wealth). One side note is that if revenues aren't growing (are staying essentially flat), then I'm not sure how backward looking use of PSRs is in that case. (just a fwiw thought). Again, any reported Sales figure is backwards looking. Stock prices will resume their upward direction long before most individual investors detect increased sales. I am interested in what methods you feel are better. The best methods found by O'Shaughnessy in looking at 50 years worth of data start with a PSR less than 1.5 and improving relative strength.

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (20862)	6/26/1998 2:16:00 PM
From: marc henschke	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Teri: Just out of curiosity, why does someone like you with such an overwhelmingly negative view of AMAT's short term and midterm prospects apparently spend hours each day reading the AMAT thread? What exactly is your incentive for constantly scouring the internet looking for any and every story with pessimistic implications for the semi equipment industry? If you really believe your own doomsday postings, why aren't you shorting the stock at these levels? If you are too unsure of your own purported views to be shorting the stock, what's making you so unsure (i.e., what are the counterarguments to your one-sided postings that you apparently respect enough to keep you from shorting the stock)? If you see no significant recovery for AMAT until late 1999 or year 2000, why not spend your time and energy on some other stock that won't be dead money for the next two years? I ask these questions not to attack you personally, nor to discourage the posting of any and all viewpoints on these threads. Indeed, the very reason I come to this thread each day is to get a good cross-sampling of all the opinions out there in the marketplace, yours included. Rather, I ask these questions because I'm curious about your psychology -- about your transition from an "ooh baby" cheerleader of spring '97 to an equally one-sided nattering nabob of negativism this summer. Will an era ever dawn in which you see the semmi equipment market in shades of gray, acnowledge your own lack of conviction, and take to posting balanced and conflicting pieces of information about AMAT?