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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lrrp who wrote (6979)	9/20/1998 12:37:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 10921

Irrp - I missed the warnings at the middle and the top As did many people, including among others, myself, Jim Morgan, ... .<g> Everyone agreed that DRAM was in a somewhat risky spot, but logic IC's appeared to be different. One problem, among several, is that even as late as January or February the foundries were still reporting overbooking. Another problem was that unit sales were still growing briskly, again until February or March. The only reliable indicator seems to be the one that Kurlak tracks - inventories. The problem is that these can be hard to track, especially outside of the PC industry (PC inventory can be obtained by looking at the Compaq's and Comp USA's, but who do you look at to find the retail inventory of cell phones?) All JMO Clark

To: lrrp who wrote (6979)	9/20/1998 2:54:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10921

Lrrp, A good description of what happened from a layman's macroeconomic sense may be found in "Business Cycles" by Joseph A Schumpeter. If I remember correctly the Industrial Revolution was a period of significant above trend wealth creation. As always, there are caveats, if one was struggling against a factory from a dying cottage industry, one may have a very different view. Periods of significant growth usually lead to over optimistic buildups of capacity followed by a recession and sometimes a depression. I don't remember what happened at the end of the Industrial Revolution. WILL LYONS, Are you out there? Help!... Re specific evidence: By the time we (individual investors) see it, the stock prices will be more than double their lows. Traditional clues have come from chipmakers adding back end capacity. So if KLIC goes up for no reason whatsoever, start getting out of cash and perhaps quickly. I'd like to see RFQs go up sharply, I'd like to see fab utilization above 90% but I have no timely source of this data. RE ASYT: It's a small cap; not well followed; its business is not well understood nor the necessity for SMIF technology as feature sizes decrease; nor the role of SMIF in improving fab yields and productivity; nor its monopoly for its niche. And even for those that do understand all this, the company is too small to be touched by most of the large mutual funds. Re Foresight: The only person that I saw with a reasonably accurate prediction of the process leading from the DRAM glut to a "depression" in the rest of the Chip companies was Mike Burke on the ATML thread (and the ASK Mike Burke thread). He was dead wrong about the timing but what he predicted did come to pass 2 years later. Might have been luck, but I'm sure Mike will swear it was skill. Personally, I did not expect the impact on the Equipment sector to be any near this pronounced or likely to last for another year; let alone another year and a half. I had expected recovery to be apparent by now. I was wrong. In terms of the top of the next cycle, there'll probably be so many people swearing never to get burned again, that it will be impossible to guess the stock price top. Good luck, Ian.