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> I guess one needs to be open-minded..
not too much, though, you gotta be careful. yer brains could fall out ...
re gold stocks:
interesting action on glg this a.m. .... shakeout?
same old, same old
i hope i'm not the only one who sees the humor in coms "beating" analyst estimates by a penny, after having warned about a month ago and now coming in with earnings that meet the guidance they gave in that warning.
'The easiest way to get this-- for the unitiated-- is simply to go "the Street," punch in a stock and then, at the bottom of the page, click on "Second Opinion."'
this is interesting. thanks for the pointer.
for lesser techs, though, lots of the reports seems to be out of date > 1 month.
thanks augie. although what you have drawn is a bit negative in itself (i.e. you added the rising support line from march, which is intact but is currently around $9+. however, at least one of their negatives was that that the stock was trading below trendline, which would be the violation of the support line from the more recent run on monday, which it was trading below yesterday. i guess the big question is whether the move looks like a shakeout+accumulation. anyway, time will tell, i suppose.
by the way, also thanks to opnion. one of these days i'll have to learn something about pnf.
a little meta-question here: if there is another leg up here, as we go into end of month, then wouldn't you expect that the movers and shakers might be the big crap techs rather than the little craps, as fund managers chase performance and dress their windows?
by the way, i must concur with the previous poster: some of these things are favorite shorts, but personally i'm uncomfortable holding something long when i might get caught by funnymentals. extr was a good ride on the way down this time, though. if you're right, it probably will be again ...
pnf guys: could someone comment on this. how reliable is a double bottom break considered in the pnf world? (from dorsey wright.)
[PMCS] PMC-Sierra, Inc. ($12.110) broke a double bottom at $11.0, a pattern similar to a shakeout formation, but occuring below the trend line. With the sector close to moving back to defense from nearly 80%, this is a high risk position and those long should be looking to protect the move we have recently seen rather than speculate for another leg higher. Trim or hedge any long exposure, no near-term support within reasonable distance of here.
> Platinum has been strong
interesting to note that lease rates for platinum spiked high last week. though i suspect that was related to expiry ...
http://www.kitco.com/charts/pt_leaserates.html
hunh?? "GAAP pro forma earnings"??
16:11 ET VRTY Verity misses estimates; guides Q1 lower (17.27 +0.27)
Reports Q4 (May) earnings of $0.12 per share, $0.01 worse than the Reuters Research consensus of $0.13; revenues rose 11.9% year/year to $29.2 mln vs the $30.9 mln consensus; co. projecting Q1 revenue in the range of $26 million to $28 million, with GAAP pro forma earnings in the range of $0.04 to $0.06 per share; this excludes the effects of anticipated amortization of acquired intangible assets of $0.6 million, or approximately $0.01 per fully diluted share -- Reuters Research consensus estimates are $0.11 per share and $28.7 mln respectively.
"Either way, you have some good shorts."
well, with the short positions i take, i usually prefer to hold over a longer period; if i daytrade, i tend to thrash around alot and - if lucky - just end up flat. so what's worked for me is to be a bit more risk tolerant and ease into positions. most of what i have now, i've been holding from higher up. (pmcs had hedges ...)
by the way, mlsoft - as you'll see, lots of the things i happen to play (short) come from your prior recommendations. very profitable! thanks mucho.
"At the moment I am more concerned that the KLAC, NVLS and CDWC that I bought during the selling this morning are not acting any better than they are."
ah. my only concern is that klic, brks, acf and pmcs are behaving better now than earlier, since i'm short ... and added a tentative short of cof just below 50 this a.m.
mlsoft,
you said:
"I have some bids in today, but none have been hit yet - the stocks are once again holding up better than the POG would indicate."
just eyeballing it, it seems like some of the miners are bumping up against the rising support line for their recent rally right here. it doesn't concern you that, at lower prices, they'll probably have breached this?
(i'm looking at gg, glg here ...)
> PMCS is one of my longer term picks for possible BK.
well, i'm not sure about bk, but the sector sure needs consolidation - or fewer players. my target here has been sub $1 for quite a while. its just been a frustrating stock to play, because of "unusual" spikes in the price (the most extreme that i remember being back in the fall, where it went from 6+ to 8+ in 10 mins and then straight back down, all within a couple hours, intraday. or another time when someone came in and dropped a bid for 250k shares on the bid. which, at the time, was nearly 10% of the avg daily volume. (i dunno, i guess its presence in the s&p 500 keeps enuf shares locked up, so that the actual trading float is somewhat small and easier to manipulate ...)
> re pmcs. NT & csco still its key customers now?
yes, well csco at least. they've been touting other directions for their mips business as well.
the big problem in this space is redundancy among all of these guys - amcc, pmcs, brcm, vtss, etc. i haven't heard the brcm buyout rumor. there used to be an amcc buyout rumor; however, that one i pretty much know could be dismissed simply because of the degree of overlap between their product lines.
anyway, i'd be skeptical of any pmcs buyout rumor: a quick look at their debt/equity shows that it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
and then, add to that - as noted in their recent 10-q (or 10-k, i forget which) - that because a big chunk of the company is located in canada, the strong canadian dollar should be expected to hit their operating profits rather strongly.
re pmcs: as i've said before, i've been following (and shorting) this thing for a *long* time. the analyst tug-of-war here is amazing. but the stock certainly has the *feel* (to me) of being manipulated by a small group. (doesn't seem to be a whole lot of daytrading interest, just periodic jams ...)
laff. :)
but on volume of 188,511. nothing to write home about.
"BRCM holding up nicely."
but pmcs is getting hit hard. yay!
"I'm relieved that at least one person took the time read it."
hey, he's not the only one. sometimes i just read silently :)
"THE FED FILES... Conspiracy theories of the Fed buying Treasurys abound. The truth is out there."
interesting addendum here, article in today's wsj suggests that fed apparently now questions the feasiblity of that strategy. (and, along the way, seems to
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105606474353678900,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
[excerpt]
The more the Fed has studied targeting bond yields, the more difficult it has looked. Fed governor Ben Bernanke, a Princeton University academic, last November spelled out how the Fed bought large quantities of long-term Treasury bonds to enforce a 2.5% ceiling on yields between 1942 and 1951. Targeting bond yields "would provide sufficient leverage for the Fed to achieve its goals in most plausible scenarios," Mr. Bernanke asserted.
But bond trading is far bigger and more complicated than it was in the 1940s. Buying bonds might be a useful signal to the markets, much like intervention in foreign-exchange markets. But it might fail if the markets viewed the world differently than the Fed. Furthermore, the Treasury market is now inextricably linked to other markets, such as for interest-rate derivatives, mortgage-backed securities and foreign exchange. Nobody knows how an artificial target yield enforced by the Fed would ripple through those markets.
Then there's the question of what Fed officials call the "exit strategy." The Fed got rid of the wartime 2.5% ceiling in 1951 only after a fierce battle with the Treasury, for which the ceiling held down borrowing costs. All these problems mean that while the Fed may still buy bonds, it is not likely as a stand-alone strategy.
The most effective way to convince investors that short-term rates will be low for a long time is to lower them even further. But as rates fall to zero that presents additional problems, such as the viability of money-market mutual funds. In the last two weeks, the Fed's supervisory staff, who monitor the safety and soundness of banks, have been visiting money-market funds to ask how they'd be affected by a federal-funds rate as low as 0.25%, a manager at one bank-owned fund said.
speaking of cof and its sector and your core shorts: acf looks like its made a more reliable turnaround ...
re msft: appy polly loggies. i was familiar only with beijing and merely assumed that, because you were talking about newer trends in outsourcing, that msft research in bangalore was opened recently.
> whereas the first employee in India was hired in 1990:
the press coverage you link to doesn't say a whole lot, but it doesn't quite sound like *research*; it could even be just sales for all i can tell. my impression of msft in the past has been that it doesn't really send the source code of its crown jewels out of the u.s., although perhaps they've distributed some lesser projects.
msft research in beijing *is* a research group, not an r&d group (i.e. programmers). they sit and think and write papers and try to dream up tomorrow's cash cow, although their mission has been somewhat degraded over the years.
anyway, i'm not quite sure how things have changed over the years in general, since i haven't really followed the situation. i remember the modus operandi of folks like egov.com, where all of the product/project managers were in the u.s., they'd architect something in complete detail, and then send it off to india or china for implementation. a sort of "monkeys with typewriters" paradigm. has it gone beyond that now? i don't know ...
[in edit]
"But as mentioned, Microsoft started to hire in India during 1990 already."
yah, but they always had a *sales force* located there. as the product list from bangalore suggests, the products are pretty minor things that don't bring in alot of cash, and pretty much represent "maintainance". i'm pretty sure that "services for unix" was the software they were compelled to buy from bell labs (lucent or at&t), because they refused to provide key source code for a recent revision of their operating system to permit them to keep the product working on these new releases, and they were sued (or at least threatened with a lawsuit) and settled. nevertheless, one thing that's clear is that msft does *not* want "services for unix" to be an important product at any time in the future.
msr beijing, on the other hand, it pretty much just research: a couple phd's and lots of masters students, writing papers, submitting them to siggraph every year. my memory is fuzzy here, but i seem to recall that having more to do with the campaign against rampant piracy in china than anything else.
> super bullish on Japan and Asia. As I am.
even marc faber. which has almost persuaded me to commit a bit there ...
> If a "mid-quarter" update does not include news like that, then
> what is it for?
perhaps it was "too minor" for that. anyway, i liked that. that's when i shorted. actually, covered thursday, not friday. should have held out for a bit more, but i was already in brks.
i'm surprised klic didn't get more mileage out of the semi equip book to bill, since the discussion that came along with it said that packaging etc could see growth in the teens ... (not that i'm saying it would affect fundamentals any, but news is news in this market.)
> Realeasing that news separately, to have more
> effect, told me that these guys are trying a little too hard to
> keep the stock price up, which probably means it won't stay
> up...
yah, well the melodrama i'm following is pmcs, where the drama is among the analysts. old tricks like, downgrade low, upgrade high (cibc). but a nice move, on friday, was merrill, i think, coming out and questioning the "premium" that cibc claimed the shares should fetch; and then cibc coming out in defense of the stock. (while meanwhile, lehman downgraded earnings projections on dj newswire.) all, of course, while the stock was hovering just above a 12.50 strike ...
(well, cibc had previously pushed it up from 11's to 13+, merrill brought it back down to to just under 12.5.)
its amazing to me that the analysts nowadays are so brazen with their upgrades/downgrades in some of this stuff. my naive self would say that this *has to* be the last tech rally, cuz these guys are just losing any shred of credibility they're still hanging on to.
> even Microsoft opened their first foreign research lab in
> Bangalore.
actually, i think the first was microsoft research beijing, quite a few years ago -- at least the first in the far east.
having followed klic closely for the past 6 months or so, let me add that the only thing that seems to add short term risk to this stock is news: all of its significant gains during this rally have been ~15-20% jumps on press releases ("we sold something"). however, the positive side here is that - in spite of the high short interest - it hasn't moved a whole lot, suggesting that either the shorts are pretty tenacious or the longs appropriately cautious.
> KLIC
klic is pretty volatile, though on a different timescale. those "sold another one" pr announcements have been good for a $1 pop during this month, although other than that, the stock pretty much just generally bleeds down. but so slowly that i actually exited my position on friday. (considering it one of the more long term shorts.) brks shows a bit more volatility on a day to day basis, which - at least for me - has provided some better entry points for "safer" shorts. (actually, part of my reason for exiting klic was to diversify. the weaker techs were a good play last week, and was able to get into some like extr ($6) and rsas (somewhere under $11).
mlsoft et al.: shaeffers bullish on gg
http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/sentiment/printout.asp?ID=7931
"the HUI is kind of making a double top here"
hmm. if so, isn't that a triple top? (6/02, 1/03, 6/03)
oops. no offense intended :-P i have seen that come up before in the case of order imbalances ... but usually doesn't hang around for so long. of course, trading hasn't begun yet, so i suppose we'll see ...
goldbugs ... schwab seems to be showing nem as 'halted'. any reason for this that you've seen?
"HUI pulling back a bit. Looks like this initial breakout attempt has failed. The next attempt after a pullback probably will be more successful IMHO"
hmm. does this still look like a failure to you? nem held up well on high volume, and gg looks great ...
> Real chance of Naz closing green.
hmm. intraday maybe, but closing? haven't the last two weeks shown that everyone bails on friday, and so playing liklihoods, there should be a little exodus today in anticipation of red tomorrow ... which of course could mean green tomorrow ...
> Ralph Bloch on CNBC sees 1/3 of the rally retrace.
actually, he said he *hopes*. and that he went to cash last week and bought on friday.
the other guy was interesting: apparently mutual fund inflows slowed by 50% last month to $8B with most of it going overwhelmingly into conservative plays (convertible bond funds, growth and income, value). the sheeple haven't been enticed yet.
mlsoft: you've mentioned cbd/cursf a couple times, and that you traded it through schwab. i can't seem to find historical charts of it there. do you know where that can be found?
"I posted it in response to your claim that ..."
that wasn't *my* claim, though i suppose it was someone's ...
"I think the evidence shows that your statement is one of those commonly held beliefs which does not withstand close scrutiny."
but those were 10-year pe's: they all include "bottom + previous bubble" or "bottom + recovery".
now personally, i wouldn't doubt that pe's are high at bottoms. after all, thats what you always see in the semi cycle anyway, since e's are so stressed. but then, use a different metric. p/s on techs of 10+ are hardly gonna be a norm at market bottoms ...
re nem: isn't this confirming the breakout from last week?
> But are they really?
i won't even argue the 10-year p/e point, although i'd object to that. however:
your chart is logarithmic. it's not showing that things are "almost like the 30's", but rather that pe highs were an order of magnitude higher in 2000, and pe lows were almost 2 orders of magnitude higher.
"What I am trying to say is that just maybe the ebb and flow of history, market movements and business cycles are so overwhleming that they cannot be stopped--only slowed?"
or made worse ...