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Technology Stocks : THQ,Inc. (THQI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marc Newman who wrote (10240)	3/15/1999 10:41:00 AM
From: Zirdu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14266

I pulled up 5 year charts of ERTS, ATVI, AKLM and THQI. ERTS, ATVI and AKLM all had relative peaks about 9/15/95. From there to 4/30/97 they lost 52%, 50% and 90% respectively. I am guessing that this was due to platform change about that time or a little before. (Playstation introduced in US in 1995, and Nintendo 64 in 1996) However, during this exact same time period THQI gained 83% in price! I suspect that worry about platform change, and what it did to most video game stocks, is what is pressuring video game stocks right now. This time, THQI is caught up in the downdraft, since no one knows if history will repeat and whether THQ will weather the transition as well as it did last time. And this time, the downdraft in stock price in the video game companies is coming earlier (i.e. sooner before the actual platform transition) than last time. History in the stock market never repeats exactly, but often a similar theme will play out again, only at an earlier time, as investors remember "what happened last time", and all try to anticipate the event sooner and sooner before it actually happens. During the 9/15/95 period to 4/30/97 period, by the way, (during which THQI gained 83%) even THQI was not immune to downdraft. THQI moved down steadily for a period of about 16 weeks, from about 12/20/96 to 3/31/97, during which time it's stock lost about 43%. By way of comparison, I count our recent down draft in THQI stock price at about 12 weeks in duration, from a relative peak during the week of 12/11/98. During that week we hit a high of 31 3/8. To our recent low of about 18 1/2, that is a drop of about 41%. So, if history is any judge, we are about at the bottom, both in price and time. The 16 weak period of weakness from 12/20/96 to 3/31/97, by the way, has been the longest period of sustained down draft in THQI stock price since THQI bottomed on about 6/15/95. If you look at a weekly 5 year chart of THQI, you will see that we are still in an broad uptrend, which started on about 6/15/95.