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To: Suresh who wrote (7610)	11/1/1998 7:39:00 PM
From: The Perfect Hedge	Respond to of 44573

They shouldn't.Greenspam gave everybody a false green light and techs are hot...They will crash but IMO not until after X-mas bs... B*

To: Suresh who wrote (7610)	11/1/1998 8:07:00 PM
From: Jerry Olson	Respond to of 44573

Hi SG excellent observation my friend... yes, because of the segmented semis stocks, i do see fragments of good/bad within the confines of this Total Sector... The DRAM guys MU etc are doing better, then the equipment guys... both the frontend & backend..AMAT/KLIC...types arent really doing that well yet... then there are the specialty types UTEK/SVGI, starting to come to life.. i'm just trading them right now...i've said it here before, there is still 2-3 quarters of trouble out and about... but there ARE signs of life...South Korea may come back on line after an excellent reaction to the IMF package & there own wonderful stringent monetary policies, that have begun to work... if Korea emerges again, and begins to start Capital Spending then the equips guys will rock & roll all over again, just like in NOv/Dec 96... my current play is KLAC strickly on P&F Bullish Catapult Chart... regards Jerry

To: Suresh who wrote (7610)	11/2/1998 2:12:00 PM
From: Jerry Olson	Respond to of 44573

Hi SG i just ran across this....sounds like what i've been saying.... An Investment Opinion by Dale Wettlaufer For Every Sector, Turn, Turn Semiconductor yield management company KLA-Tencor (Nasdaq:KLAC - news) was downgraded to "neutral" from "outperform" this morning by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, easing the stock down $1 5/16 to $35 9/16. Also receiving the same downgrade from MSDW were a number of other firms in the semiconductor capital equipment industry, including wafer stepper company ASM Lithography (NYSE:ASMLF - news) , down $13/16 to $24 11/16; DuPont Photomasks (Nasdaq:DPMI - news) , down $2 1/4 to $34; and etch and chemical mechanical planarization equipment company LAM Research (Nasdaq:LRCX - news) , off $5/16 to $14 1/8. Wafer stepper company Ultratech Stepper (Nasdaq:UTEK - news) was also downgraded, but ticked up $5/8 to $18 5/8 at midday. These downgrades come shortly after the sector saw a nice boost from anecdotal evidence of some of the gloom lifting in the outlook for the group. In its recent conference call, the CEO of power supply manufacturer Advanced Energy Industries (Nasdaq:AEIS - news) said that the company was seeing better activity for the fourth quarter, which sent that company's stock from near $7 to its present level above $12. That being some of the first positive guidance the sector had seen in a while, a number of stocks took wing on the comments and a change in sentiment has been seen since. Objectively, there aren't a lot of data points to cling to, but a number of way points should be considered. The recent semiconductor equipment book-to-bill ratio reached a historic low of 0.57 (the data has been tracked since 1991, not a vintage year), with the front-end book-to-bill reaching 0.55, a very low number indicating that for every $1 in billings for the front-end equipment companies, they are taking in only $0.55 in new bookings. Interestingly, advancements in semiconductor feature sizes aren't helping the front-end companies, as fewer machines per device are needed when you can fit more devices on a single wafer. On the flipside, the yield management firms like KLA-Tencor and back-end companies like Teradyne (NYSE:TER - news) should benefit from increasing output. Traditionally, back-end companies have seen recoveries in advance of the front-end companies, as increases in capacity are first seen on the test and assembly end of things, rather than in processing. To that end, the back-end book-to-bill ratio recently rose to 0.60 in September from 0.53 in August. Teradyne has responded to that, but leading assembly equipment company Kulicke & Soffa (Nasdaq:KLIC - news) has been somewhat sluggish. Value investors have been patient with this sector for a while, as many of these companies are cash-rich and still serve an end-market with good volume growth dynamics. Whether the group is really turning or not is hard to tell, but the Applied Materials (Nasdaq:AMAT - news) conference call this month will be the next checkpoint for the sector. UPS Business systems management software firm Boole & Babbage (Nasdaq:BOOL - news) gained $3 7/16 to $30 1/16 after agreeing to be acquired by