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

To: Robert Douglas who wrote (7351)	11/24/1998 12:03:00 PM
From: Q.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Robert, it didn't surprise me, as I already knew it. But it must be a surprise to somebody, because people in online threads, including this one, exert effort trying to understand AMAT's price in terms of the company's fundamentals. Why is there a highly active thread for AMAT, where people talk about the company and the stock? There's no point in it. They are wasting their time. They might as well try to use a divining rod to make their investment decision. The stock market doesn't care about any changes in the company that underlies AMAT stock. It cares only about the semiconductor industry as a whole. In other words, the market thinks that AMAT and its customers are the same thing. Which would be reasonable enough if the customers' capital spending were always a fixed percentage of their sales. That's obviously not true, but the market acts that way. One could argue that AMAT stock should depend on company-specific fundamentals, and this would certainly be gratifying to those people who are wasting their time trying to analyze it that way, but the market just doesn't work that way. So if you are primarily interested in the semiconductor makers, and you want a SOX equity rather than SOX options to play that industry, then you should trade AMAT stock. But if you want an equity instrument that has something to do with capital spending by semiconductor companies, AMAT is not it.