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Technology Stocks : IBM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: vip who wrote (4662)	2/5/1999 4:27:00 PM
From: Dave Kahn	Respond to of 8218

NOPE wish I Knew

To: vip who wrote (4662)	2/5/1999 5:01:00 PM
From: Arrow Hd.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8218

FWIW, the slide is due to a number of issues. There still is residual fallout over the 6% 4th quarter revenue number and the hardware shortfalls. Then there is the chip pricing issues that hit Intel and others this week. IBM makes chips and sells them through OEM channels. It is somewhere around a billion per year and has been very profitable. We are entering seasonal weakness for PCs and the numbers in this sector are not too good yr. to date. The inference regarding chip price attrition is that hardware sales are dropping which reduces demand for chips which causes increased competition and price attrition for the remaining business. Then you have the investment allocation gurus who hallucinate that you should move another five percent to cash and the sector crowd that try to hype whatever they think is hot, and then is it a value play or a growth play, etc. Add to this the fact that interest rates are moving up slightly and there is thought that the Fed will raise them this summer (rising interest rates kill a market quicker than anything) and though today's labor statistics washed and were inconclusive every dopey economist was at the wall of worry wondering what draconian plot was actually at hand here. Beyond all that though, nothing very fundemental was going on and at some point all this cash is going to burn a hole in every fund managers pocket and they will never catch up but that will not be our problem. Have a good weekend.