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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (44595)	3/29/1999 9:14:00 PM
From: Carl R.	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 53903

I'm glad you can take a joke. <G> Seriously though, to improve your investing you need to keep your eye on marginal news as much as the overall picture. I had good training in this a couple years ago when I used to regularly trade Cyrix, before they were bought by National Semi. Did I seriously think they were a better company than Intel? No. But they moved a lot more, and if you kept your eye on the marginal news you could do quite well. For them the old saw buy the rumor, sell the news, was ever so true. The important thing was that while their business sucked, sometimes it sucked less than others. In the case of MU the stock trends up when the marginal news is good, and down when the marginal news is bad. Does the absolute level have any attachment to reality? Not really. Should it? Probably, but how many companies are valued realistically? I can't think of any off the top of my head. It really doesn't matter whether you look at internut stocks, tech high flyers like CSCO, consumer products like KO, or low-flyers like RCII. So when you are placing your puts, we know you already are thinking "MU's business sucks", but also ask yourself "will MU's business suck more tomorrow", or at least "will it be any more clear tomorrow that MU's business sucks". If it won't suck any more tomorrow than it sucks today, why should it go down? Thus the thing that drove MU's stock up was Korean shutdowns, the LG strike, improved MU yields, flat memory prices. These things made MU's business suck less (i.e. they beat estimates). What has driven it back down again? Koreans increasing output, LG back to work, weak PC sales, and falling memory prices. These promise to make MU's business suck worse (i.e. they may not make estimates). So while looking at the big picture is useful, it is also critical to look at marginal changes in the picture. Keep this in mind and you'll make more money trading this stock. I would also recommend avoiding options, but I know that would be futile. <G> Carl