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

To: Francis Chow who wrote (59267)	7/3/1998 2:08:00 AM
From: Herschel Rubin	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Does anyone ever wonder why it is so difficult for our superb Hi-Tech companies (Intc, CPQ, SEG, QNTM, etc.) to predict oversupply in their own markets??? I mean, seriously: Compare the difficulty of designing a Pentium II chip to projecting chip demand or disk drive demand, say, just one or two months ahead!! With their savvy market research staff to closely monitor their markets, one would think they could have avoided the supply problems we've seen lately. Granted, part of the answer to the question is that few people could predict the onset of the Asian Flu in October 97. But we can blame only so much on the onset of the Asian Flu. Now that the Asian Flu has become a household word, one would think that companies would have had a close watch on Asia! Also part of the problem is due to PC unit-price declines, which could also have been monitored and predicted. You would also think there would be a shift in investment interest to semi issues that benefit from unit sales volumes (which have been increasing) instead of high unit prices. Being a skeptic, it seems there are alterior motives for companies to want their shares to trade lower (e.g. MSFT occasionally talks down the value of their stock before they need to gather more shares for employee stock options). Other reasons might be fear of shareholder lawsuits, so they make sure that warnings are more than sufficient. Anybody have any other thoughts? BTW, I agree with Dale's comment earlier that the MM's don't really build large positions over a long period of time. They may build "positions" from day to day in the course of making a market, but they don't look ahead months at a time. Re: Kurlak and other analysts... Without a doubt they try to herd the market to their advantage. Before they issue downgrades, you can rest assured, they've already told their best clients to sell. And while they're telling the herd to stay away, they're busy accumulating as the weak hands, frightened by their words, unwittingly sell shares to them. That's what's so great about the Internet and Stock Chat Sites -- knowledge is power. The more people who know about the shenanagins that go on behind the scenes, the less able analysts will be to use their position to influence the markets in their favor! As I've said, I'm not in INTC (who cares anyway) -- I'm in other semi related stocks. Just stopping by for the discussion, which is quite civil here. Comments from ThreadDwellers would be entertaining on why chip demand prediction skills seem to have been rather lacking . Francis, Thanks for the links.