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

To: Spaw who wrote (22845)	2/11/1999 10:40:00 AM
From: engineer	Respond to of 152472

It is very interesting to look at the chart with 1 min time. You can see how when the stock reaches even numbers like 67, 68 the volume goes very low and the price sits there for about 5-10 minutes in a VERY narrow trading range. like they all dialed in 67 and just sat.

To: Spaw who wrote (22845)	2/11/1999 10:54:00 AM
From: John Dough	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Spaw, since you seem to know quite a bit about options, when do the February options expire? It seems that the stock price tends to gravitate towards a multiple of 5 on expiration day. Presumably, so that as many options as possible will expire worthless. If expiration day is soon, I'd expect 65 or 70 as a close on that date. Regards, Mark

To: Spaw who wrote (22845)	2/11/1999 11:08:00 AM
From: Richard Knox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Spaw, Agreed. The market may not cooperate and that is the biggest risk near term. I'm still bullish and will stay long on the Q. Thanks.

To: Spaw who wrote (22845)	2/11/1999 2:51:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

Magical Moments in Markets Spaw, while the "CURRENT PRICE IS..." is somewhat unpredictable because Jon's "More buyers than sellers" is the determinant and understanding the reasons herds of people buy and sell, how many of them and how greedily/desperately is not quite as easy as reading a train timetable, there are well known motivating factors which we can have a reasonable guess at. Some people use Bollinger Bands, which I believe is some musical group whose musical crescendoes mark market peaks. Others use 90 or 120 day moving averages, double top formations, head and shoulders shapes in the tea leaves, Metastock Pro, money flows, momentum trading, simple incantations and [as Northforce just showed] reverse selling of human sacrifices while blindfolded to trick the Market Gods. Personally, I reckon all that stuff is a lot of rot. Sure, awareness spreads like a Webloom[TM] and buying will increase at higher prices while the awareness, excitement and conviction spreads, but one would need to measure that rate of spread and have some model for vectors of transmission and fizzling out factors. For example some very fascinating, but not very valuable news might spread a huge distance, like a high purity nuclear fission chain reaction, through all of the Web and out into the 3D world and to the farthest corners of Rwanda, but it might happen over a period of only 5 days, due its fascinating nature, and only one person in a million might be moved to move their money into buying stock in the company concerned because the news is interesting, but not very profitable for the company. That would be a "High Sizzle - High Fizzle" price movement. Momentum Geeks would see the movement in price start steeply due to more buyers than sellers. They'd buy in after they'd confirmed the move over a period of 4 days. On the fifth day the price would crash as no more buyers appeared. On the other hand, Q! has "Low Sizzle - Low Fizzle". Despite the most wonderful technology, almost nobody has heard of Qualcomm and if they have heard of it, they have little idea what they do and if they do, they have negligible understanding of it. Rant about orthogonal concatenated Quarkian wave functions in convoluted logic to your average Rwandan or even Main Street, Los Angeles, Big Mac muncher and you'll be ignored at best or attacked at worst. So Q! stock just goes on gradually rising as the profits roll in. Analysts who spend their lives analysing have only a glib patter to justify their comments on Q! But they can't deny and they can understand profits growth. When they look behind the profit, they see sales soaring, and some of the other factors which they can figure is the reason behind the growth. But they are cautious because loosing money in a liquidity frenzy is worse than loosening bowels due to gastrointestinal liquidity in a crowded underground train; you lose your money and lose your dignity respectively. So they only cautiously issue the odd 'this stock might do okay' once there are sufficient other analysts doing the same so they can be seen to be in a safe crowd. Not many go leaping out like Gregg Powers full of conviction and ardour with their client's money. So they leave him alone there in frustration, ignoring his pleas that this is the hottest stock on earth run by the best people on earth. Yahoo! is another story. Anyone can understand it [or thinks they can]. There are billions of people using or going to use the internet and Yahoo! is the brand leader and every click is a dollar. The news travels fast and far with a very High Sizzle. So the stock rockets in a short time. It has got huge growth and prospects are great for some companies in the Web, but which ones? We won't know that for a while - a hint will come when Yahoo's market share starts dropping. Because Webtime is fast, I expect a High Fizzle factor in the internet stocks. Within a couple of years we should know which companies are doing really well and which aren't. In the Q! world, lead times are long so 5 year chunks are needed to see what's doing well. Sure, stock prices are a mystery in the short run if we try to predict the Sizzle and Fizzle, but if the money and profits are flowing in the right direction, the stock price will move as the Sizzle spreads. One of these days I'm going to move onto predicting the Sizzle and Fizzle. That's where the fast money is. But it's like herding cats while being one; quite tricky and one could get scratched and bitten quite badly, especially if the other cats are Bengal Tigers. It's also a bit Goedelian - being inside a system and changing it, or something like that; self-reverential. I wonder if it's time for a curse, incantatation or fatwah? Nahhh!! I tried that... Mqurice This should keep you all busy for a while: nl.ijs.si home.earthlink.net psyche.cs.monash.edu.au