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

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (17415)	10/29/1998 8:03:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

October 29, 1998 Market Rap with Bill Fleckenstein Wall Street plays Beat the Number As I see it The overnight markets were quiet last night, but who cares anyway because the rest of the world doesn't matter to us. We are Wall Street and on Wall Street we don't care about fundamentals, we don't care about earnings, we don't care about anything. ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS OUR GAME CALLED "Beat the Number." Last night's insult to our intelligence was Amazon.com. Forget about the fact that the number was way worse than people expected, because the SEC is cracking down on the nonsense in merger accounting land. Amazon.com "beat" the number as it lost less then it was supposed to; for example, the "surprise" charges. This is just one of the tactics in the play book of Beat the Number. It's called Move the Bar. The original estimate for this quarter was about an 8-cent loss. That was bumped to 25 cents, then into the 40s and, most recently, was adjusted to a 57-cent loss. Well, because the company lost less than expected, it gets to "beat" the number. Even the New York Times missed this, saying that there was an improvement because it was less of a loss. What they forgot to say was that it was relative to most recent expectations. At least the Wall Street Journal was able to identify this. Here is a list of the earnings progress since Amazon.com came public. If the company ever could have a really bad quarter and lose a few bucks a share, its stock could surge to $300. You have to love a business that sells dollar bills for $.95. 3/97 ($.08) 6/97 ($.16) 9/97 ($.185) 12/97 ($.205) 3/98 ($.20) 6/98 ($.44) 9/98 ($.90) I have nothing personal against Amazon.com or any of the other companies that I speak pejoratively about. My objection is the monstrous discrepancy between the value of the business, the fundamentals and the prospective rates of returns for the business. I think that Amazon.com is a fine product to use, but the market has bid up the stock price to where it has no relationship to the business. I'm sure many of the shareholders have no notion of how business works, they just like the idea or the chart. (I know this is true for many companies because of the questions people ask me. Individuals rarely even know the market cap.) Another play in the book of Beat the Number is, We Can Make Up Whatever We Want. Ingram Micro (IM), another value added reseller of PCs, talked about tremendous price pressure in PCs. Some of its competitors and compatriots, including Tech Data (TECD), Compucom Systems (CMPC) and Inacom (ICO) have talked about how difficult the business has been. The channel clearing that was supposed to have occurred does not show up anywhere in the numbers. So if the value-added resellers are not doing well, what should you do? Well, of course, you should buy stock in the companies that make the products that these guys sell. And you should buy the companies that make components that go into these products. So if they sell PCs and they are having a hard time, or there is margin pressure, it is only natural to think that you should buy the PC stocks and the component companies, as well as the companies that make the equipment to supply the components. That is how you make money on Wall Street in late 1998. Whatever goofy thing is going on, just make up why it should work and it will, since there is going to be a rebound. You want to be long PCs for the imminent worldwide recession, and you too can make millions of dollars as a Wall Street analyst. In other interesting developments, Investors Intelligence, the survey that polls bulls and bears, indicated that the bulls are now up to 45 percent from only 36 percent six weeks ago and the bears are down to 39 percent from 48 percent. Another week of this nonsense and sentiment will be as lathered up as it gets. Doesn't take long to get everyone excited again, does it? Market Rap Rally lasts all day... The market rally ran wire-to-wire today and closed on its highs of the day. While the S&P 500 had a good day, that was nothing compared to the Sox, which was up 3 percent on the day. Even the bank stock index came back for a little bit of a bounce. All in all, today was quite a ramp job for the end of the month. Follow the Yellow Brick road... Once again, Brazil couldn't rally. It was down four percent on the day, but what the heck; we don't have to care about Brazil. We can speculate here at home and just pretend that those countries don't exist. There really is not much to say about today, as there was rank speculation everywhere. About the only other thing to mention is that dollar was spanked against the Japanese yen. Welcome to the Land of Oz. William A. Fleckenstein <fleckenstein@go2net.com>, special to StockSite.