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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (81518)	5/25/1999 1:23:00 PM
From: Burt Masnick	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Excellent test of technical stock analysis coming. The general view among technicians, the branch of investing that believes that they can predict the future action of a stock by the charts of a stocks price and volume, is that if Intel breaks 55, the stock should be in free fall for quite a distance. I personally have no opinion one way or another on whether stock technicians are capable of what they claim because they always couch their predictions with the caveat that stocks that have shown this pattern typically do that. The escape hatch is the word typically. What they seem to mean in plain English is that about 2/3 of the time the patterns hold and about 1/3 of the time the pattern expectations are not met. So the technicians are really playing the odds in the belief that their interpretation of the chart is "correct", their discipline is perfect and their transaction costs are minimal relative to their investment. My own experience is that some technicians are pretty consistently successful, but most have neither the discipline, the patience or the temperment that good technicians all seem to have. Of course, to the long term investor looking at basics and all but ignoring short term bounces in either direction, all technical analysis is mumbo-jumbo at best and fraudulent at worst. Bottom line is that I'm an agnostic on this issue, but I am interested because I have seen a couple of fundamentally based advisors saying buy Intel and a number of technical analysts saying short Intel. My own fundamentalist bias is that Intel is a steal right now and I don't believe that I have the temperament for playing short term swings.