Ahhh, that's just his opinion! If his opinion was any good he'd be somewhere on a beach sipping pina coladas and ogling "assets", instead of slaving over a hot keyboard hammering out articles no one should probably read LOL.
My guess is that until that last conference call, no one could say for sure what was the cause of the last few debacles the company had to deal with. Was it poor management? Was it subterfuge? Or was it (insert conspiracy theory of choice). Now the clear picture emerged, it was simply the type of sundry growing pains that companies with new products experience. Even while, or perhaps because of, an increasingly strong order book, a company falls behind on fulfillment because the orders come in from unexpected directions, for products that turn out to be unexpectedly more popular than the company foresaw. Leaving orders to pile up while the company struggled to shift gears. The nice thing about growing pains is, usually a company comes out on the other side of the tunnel much more robust than before.
Big investors know this so they tend to move ahead of the curve, and that's probably what all that buying was about. Or... It could have been shorters covering in fear of things to come. Whatever! Articles that attempt to turn mole hills into mountains don't help and seasoned investors know to be wary of them. When you see analysts peering at the metrics with microscopes in their effort to make mere wrinkles appear as mountain ranges, you simply need to ask yourself: "Why, if these very fine data points mean so much, are so highly indicative of future performance, how come the entire market hasn't yet learned to react to them?" I mean, after all, if the data points to something and that thing happens time after time, you'd think that after a few decades of it, the market would have learned a thing or two eh?
Truth is even the macro metrics don't mean much at all by themselves. Even as generally accepted as they may be, they still have to be taken in context, and not in some imaginative way, whether positive or negative. So in the final analysis here, the only things we have to hang our hats on is, the practical utility of the product and the potential size of the market for it. As well as whether or not any one company will be able to service the lions share of it. So, with that view in mind, my money is on the company with the greatest diversity and the most expertise. SSYS gave up that position when they started using DDD's service bureaus instead of obtaining those capabilities themselves. That's a real biz no no that says; "Hey, we can't keep up with this market and we're not going to try!" Merck doesn't send their patients to Pfizer as we well know.
