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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sawtooth who wrote (14370)	8/31/1998 8:48:00 PM
From: JMD	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Tim, all. Bet you all were just dying to know if the Surfer's dauber is riding just a little low in the water these days. Well, truth be told, it is a mite tough to keep the old chin up, but let's try. Most of you probably recall the story of J.P. Morgan getting a shoe shine in October '29. The shoe shine boy either asked for or gave J.P. some hot tips on the market. J.P. concluded that this was proof positive that it had reached a top, sold his portfolio, and completely avoided the crash of '29. Or so the story goes. Well today, one of the guys at the office got his hair cut. [yes, I know, we all got our hairs cut, but he had the real one.] The barber asked him for his opinion of the market and volunteered that he (the barber) sold everything at today's open. Further, if he hadn't, he would have been wiped out completely. Why? Turns out he was margined to the hilt. And the source of his equity for the margin borrowing? A home equity line of credit! That's right--the barber dude was 100% borrowed out and had everything in the market. I work in a building that houses lots of folks who work for one of the big, big stock brokerages. Margin calls were going out all day and of course more will go out tomorrow. Oddly, I see at least a ray of hope in all this. Clearly the market had gotten "high" relative to historical valuations. Worse yet, the internet stocks had gone into the ozone. Finally, some of the little folks were borrowing to throw it all on Amazon, et. al. Until they're out, we can't turn it around and they are well on their way to being out. Today had the feeling of the classic "selling climax" or so it seems to me. This does not, unfortunately, mean that we scoot right back up as we did after the October '97 blast. Much more damage this time around, and the barber dude ain't coming back for a while. So I think we continue to sell off for a while longer, hit bottom, and wallow for a while. Bottom line: I think we're close to the end, but not quite there. And I think that the problems are sufficiently intractable (that god damned Ramsey is right, again, political problems typically take longer to work out than purely economic problems)so our patience will continue to be tried. Plus we still have a few potential time bombs out there such as Prez Bill doing the resign/impeach thing. So me not seeing rapid upside. Fact, looks like some old time religion is going to come back into fashion. You know, crap like revenues, profits, market share, and p.e.'s and P/S's that have some faint touch with reality. All of which I think the Q has in abundance. So the Surfer sez: lock up them Q shares and hang on. T-Bonds @ 5% don't seem all that sexy anyway. Regards to all. Mike Doyle