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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (53351)	7/23/1998 1:40:00 AM
From: On The Tube	Respond to of 176387

<<<not sure if this was posted before 4pm or not...but here goes>>> Cramer's comments on what happened to DELL with the 5+ drop on Tuesday. "Cramer on Getting Shelled by Dell By James J. Cramer 7/22/98 12:15 AM ET "Buying Dell (DELL:Nasdaq) on Tuesday felt a bit like fighting for the Confederacy. Let's hope it's just a short-term lost cause and not something more like a Confederacy of Dunces! The action in Dell did get pretty hot late in the afternoon. Every time I stepped into the stock, I got hit by another artillery shell: a problem with gross margins, a problem with earnings, a problem with components -- all stemming from a conference call that we were listening to that neither contained nor validated any of those concerns. The shelling would wear down any long, even the informed! Of course, the whole exercise of ferreting out the truth was frustrating beyond belief. Each time a new rumor would hit our wires about Dell, I would dutifully run back into Jeff's office and get the denial, only to be sent right back by a new one. I felt like a Ping-Pong ball. By the end of the conference call, it was pretty clear that someone wanted out of Dell, as well as a whole host of other prominent Nasdaq tech names, no matter what. The PaineWebber conference call was a bogus excuse to sell. In another tape, Dell would come right back. But in the incredibly overbought Nasdaq market, who knew where it would stop going down? The long-awaited pullback had begun and nobody wants to have a standoff here, where there is no cover or support. Finally, at 3:45 p.m., we both threw up our hands and adopted a "wide scale," where we would pick up shares of Dell less aggressively until the selling abated a bit. It never did. In the end, the stock got saved by the bell, not by the analysis. It wasn't the only one -- there was size for sale in a whole host of Nasdaq names, mostly as byproduct of some heavy selling in NDX futures, which correlates with the big-capitalization Nasdaq names like Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq), Intel (INTC:Nasdaq), Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq) and, of course, Dell. Did anything really happen at Dell yesterday to merit the downturn? If anything, the news, which came from IBM (IBM:NYSE), was good for the industry: PC inventories looked very lean, according to Big Blue. But when stocks go down after the kind of run they have just had, I know better than to search for hard and fast explanations. It is enough to say they are due and to acknowledge that some cooler heads want to take some money off the table. Who can blame them? Just a couple of weeks ago, Dell was wallowing in the mid-80s, looking like it would never recover from its previous run to 100. Looking back, that now seems just like another victorious firefight on the way to higher ground. I am sure, now that Hewlett-Packard (HWP:NYSE) has blown up again, there will be another round of arty incoming Wednesday. I can already feel the vibrations and hear the sounds of shells hitting paydirt all around me. I smell white phosphorous. I can only hope that when the smoke clears, it won't be the flag of Dixie that I'm holding." _________________________________________________________________ James J. Cramer is manager of a hedge fund and co-chairman of TheStreet.com. At the time of publication, his firm was long IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Intel. ÿ