Let's review.

On 5/20/2007, a bullish call was made on AMD, bolstered by the claim that technicals were better than fundamentals, in the short term.

According to this chart, (5/18 is the closest the software will allow me to get to 5/20), 5/20 was a day or two past the peak before a month-long, nearly monotonic slide of about 12%.

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1196461487000&chddm=52256&q=NYSE:AMD

That said, it's a good thing that was only a short-term call, as since that peak, the stock has lost over 35% of its value.

I think there was a flaw in the reasoning used to make the bullish call: "Technical analysis" is, always has been, and always will be, a great way to make a totally random decision with unflappable resolve. The price movement of a stock is random with respect to its internal stochastics. It is non-random when the state of the company, its performance, and the sentiment and knowledge of the human beings trading in it are taken into consideration. Watching only the price and ignoring the very visible forces behind its motions will give you no information that you can use to trade. You will be throwing dice, and thinking that every right decision was a certainty while every wrong decision was anomalous or "normal variance".

AMD's fundamentals in May were horrible. It was being held up by pure hype and hope, and then hanging only from a thread. They have, if anything, worsened, because of the failure of the Barcelona launch that was being hyped then. Until significant changes are made in AMD's structure, product plans, execution, and finances, this stock will continue to fall.

re: AMD Aims Higher Price-Points with Forthcoming Phenom Chips

It indicates that Hector can't tolerate the low ASPs any more, and is willing to try to con CPU buyers into believing that expensive is good.

He's going to find out, though, that for every $300 AMD part, Intel has a better-performing, cooler-running part that they will be able to price at $240 because 45-nm chips cost less than 65-nm chips.

So while the "price war" may be over for Hector, the war never will be.

Re: Sparc installed base ripe for the picking

Maybe.

They surely shouldn't be allowed to think that Sparc is their only upgrade path. Nor even that it is the technologically superior one.

Their problem mostly is that their Sparc boxen are running things that they just don't want to fool with. Tools, license servers, databases, etc. They're okay with using the grungy old box with the crummy Solaris install on it, and can't stand the idea of what might happen if a port doesn't work.

But those willing to give up the Old Ways should be told that the non-Sparc options are good for them.

Standard stuff. Looks a lot like the current Intel-AMD agreement.

AMD today made strategic pullbacks.

Hector vowed that profitability would be job 1 (and not market share, which demands price cutting and eschewing profitability).

AMD suddenly abandoned the dual-socket FX platform.

Hector claimed that AMD had enough capacity.

These are all consistent with a company about to do massive cost cutting due to low demand, which itself is due to poor production-engineering performance. AMD has fallen way behind, something most observers and the markets knew was happening anyway, and is now starting to show signs of admitting it to themselves, if not directly to the public and shareholders.

"AMD OTOH have not released a single 2.4 Phenom into the market, they caught it unlike Intel."

Is that what "recall" means? I thought it meant something like "we shipped them and our customers said they're breaking down and we want them back".

AMD errata

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf
http://www.amd.com/epd/desiging/tsdocs/2.erratashe/index.html
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&q=site%3Aamd.com+amd+errata+opteron

Knock yourself out.

There's so much information on AMD errata it's hard to find what you want.

Internal or external consumption doesn't matter. Sony is
number 8 on the list with $8B of semi sales.

True, but I think Sony and IBM account for the internal use of products differently, meaning to IBM it's a production expense and to Sony it's an effective revenue offset by a cost elsewhere. Why this is I don't know; we're talking about two different corporate structures and two different sets of accounting laws. IBM sure doesn't seem to mind not being on the list.

IBM consumes most of its semiconductor production in-house, therefore booking little semi-sector revenue and not making the list. They count the production in the Cost of Sales for the machinery they build to sell or lease.

I suspect it's Hector's way of distracting from the real problem: poor yield of quad-core Opterons and the failure of 2.4-GHz Phenom. If he blames the prices it seems like it's market forces rather than anything he failed to do.

His hand-wringing "we need to find a way" to make money is pretty insulting to the 16,000 employees who thought they were producing something that would be massively profitable (it might have been, had it come out at its planned speeds of 2.2-2.5 GHz at its planned launch date last February).

There isn't much AMD can do now. Its eggs for next year were in the basket it dropped this year.

Shh! I like the subtlety. Like Mr. (Wherearetheynow?) Subliminal.

If you think Barcelona is anything other than a buggy or overclocked chip, you're phenomenally mistaken.

At that time, analysts were talking about the following mathematical
principle: "3 ratehikes = 1 market crash", but they kept reiterating
"Strong buy"s over the entire line.

1. Analysts are about 50% correct about what the market will do and 8% effective in making it do that.

2. When was the last time a crash followed the rules?

--Blair

Now this is interesting

Nielsen Netratings posts a real report, with real info. Look at the table of Top 25 Global Web Properties, At-Home, March 2001, on p. 3ff.

Look especially hard at the Rank by Page Views column. Then divide DIG's Page Views column entry by that for Yahoo.

http://209.249.142.22/press_releases/PDF/pr_010430.pdf

Where was this information two years ago?

I'm sure Nielsen had it. But they were only telling the public about half of it.

And I don't recall anyone at Disney saying "we're number six! and we're only a fortieth the size of number 1!"

--Blair

P.S. In case anyone's wondering, Daum Comm Corp is www.daum.net, which is obviously Korea's biggest internet provider (and the way Korea is run, could be a monopoly).

What DIG is Doing

I dunno...looks like a little business as usual, reorganizing its internet presence and promising Big Things Real Soon Now:

Disney Internet Consolidates, to Unveil New Site
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010503/wr/media_disneyinternet_dc_1.html

We've seen this three times before. Anyone psyched this time?

--Blair
"Oboy. This could drive the price of a page view up from 0.3 cents to 0.33 cents!"

DP

I'm holding nothing but INTC right now. Gobs and gobs of INTC. Everything else looked (and went) soft several months ago, so I held INTC and DIS. Then a couple of weeks ago we bottomed. And DIS has held but INTC has dropped, and I know a bottom when I see one. Just sometimes I don't know whether I see one... So I rolled out of DIS and loaded up on the way oversold INTC. And the other day I was thinking about taking profits and getting back into DIS, and that night I saw the earnings announcement...

We'll see what happens this week. If INTC gets a bounce to 32 or so and DIS does a post-news trickle down to 30 or so (just about where they were before DIS' announcement) I'll be making the switch for sure. If we get to Friday without that, it'll just be a harder call.

--Blair

Disney tops estimates HUGE.

Rising tide. Boats float.

You know the drill:

http://www.investorshub.com/beta/read_msg.asp?message_id=85272

--Blair

Disney beats estimates by almost 50%!!

Disney took a $958M charge to ring up the cash already lost on DIG, etc., but beat the First Call 13-cent charge-exclusive estimate by 6 cents/share!

Disney blows past estimates
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?source=blq/yhoo&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo&gui...

Good quotes from Insiders:

Disney Posts $567M 2Q Loss
http://biz.yahoo.com/apf/010424/earns_walt_disney_2.html

Boy, did I pick the wrong day not to roll last week's INTC profits back into the Mouse.

--Blair

21,000 WLGS...impressive...

lemme see though....

uh-oh...Yahoo doesn't respond to WLGS...says to click through to WLGS.OB....penny stock, huh? prolly worth a few quarters...woops! 3.6 cents a leaf? That's almost as low as the SEC sale fee! $360 a block! There's got to be something impressively wrong with this stock. Aside from the fact that the insiders have been selling like rats leaving a ship.

--Blair

Full Disclosure

I had to sell out yesterday. Margin pressures and the dip in INTC made me move my money around. Unfortunately, to do it, I had to liquidate my DIS, as it's the stock I saw least likely to make a significant move in the near term. Could be 3, 6, 12 months before new developments begin to accrue to its P/E.

Hopefully the tech depression is over and these moves will generate enough headroom that I can get my DIS back again soon. Without it as a buffer, I'd have gone a lot lower than I did. If the new cost structure can be used to take advantage of any upcoming periods of human opulence, i.e., if the upturn after the downturn starts generating revenues that aren't wasted on stupid costs, Disney will make a killing.

I'm not going anywhere, I'm just waiting for a sign and some free cash.

--Blair

more pissed off by the day....

You remember the chuckles when Yahoo and Reuters first started letting their automation insert those tickers? They'd insert them mid-word, or mid-company name, and sometimes anywhere....

I'm guessing that the news that DIG is now just another division of Disney hasn't got to all the journalism school dropouts that populate the nation's papers online presences yet.

At least the quotes are no longer streaming:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=DIG&d=t

--Blair
"Oh give me a home, where the editors roam, with their commas and colons well-layed..."

The Online News Version of Hamburger Helper.

Here's an old story mixed with a new story and made into nothing much:

Disney Settles With GoTo.com Over Logo
http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law/View&c=Article&cid=Z...

And, as far as I can tell, the "new" logo is the same as the Go logo before the GoTo linking. Whoever this reporter is, she's got her tort up her shorts.

--Blair

It's a great idea, only . . .

It's the same great idea Disney had when they sunk the first couple billion in Bad Money into it.

Disney just dismantled the entire company that it had bought and reorganized to do exactly what you are saying.

But it turns out that having 400 webhacks and marketeers working on it just isn't enough to make it sell. The amount of revenue projected to result from all that effort turned out to be a pie in the sky and mud in the eye.

Competition as a fungible resource, with all those other portals and cootchie-cootchie-coo providers, didn't just reduce the margins, it made entire corporations expendible. Shook them out. Left the rest to scrape the gristle off the bones.

Now they've retreated to the only business model that will work on the Internet: fully automated production, zero support and development requirement. You can only make money at this if you spend no money at all. The micropayment internet infrastructure necessitates micro- or nil-payment internet productivity.

The exception may be Yahoo. But only if they have found a way to automate almost all of their productivity. And to continue to grow that productivity without inflating the cost of that growth.

Many of the sites that remain will outsource manual labor to webhacks on the other side of the planet (it really does still take 24 hours to fly to India, but 12 milliseconds to send an email to tell your Punjabi coders what to do for the next 6 weeks, and they'll work for a tenth the price of, say, me, and be looked upon as zillionaires by their neighbors). Many others will automate the whole schmear, becoming nothing more than a consistent presentation layer for someone else's databased content collection. Some of the rest will either provide a service that people will pay in cash or p&h to access. And some will die.

--Blair

This gives me an idea for a movie...

It's a sequel to The Little Mermaid in which the sharks start to feed on each other:

http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=25943&pod_id=10

--Blair
"This suit has no merit. And a stain on the lapel. Egg, I think."

Eisner cashes out a loser!

Insider info for DIS:
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/d/dis.html

It says they're "DIS Common", but it's obvious from the $918K in revenue that these are his 150K DIG shares, for which he paid mid-teens to low-thirties. He's out a wad. Way more than me, in both absolute and relative terms. Which is my only consolation for the past week...

--Blair
"Rejoice if you got 'em."

It ended when they tied the stock price to the price of DIS.

At that point, DIG's actions had little to do with DIG's price.

Go.Com was deader'n Bambi's mother. If DIS had not announced the 6-for-1 price lock, before the plant was shuttered, where would the price of DIG be right now? $2? $1? $0.09?

If you still own any, they saved your ass, and left you with the option to sell or convert.

Now they're trying to get a few bucks out of the domain name.

Hell. I'd give them eight grand for "go.com". But GoTo.Com seems to have thought it was a much more synergistic move for them. They must've bid nine.

DIS has the perfect defense to any class-action suit: "we were as stupid about the Internet as anyone." The startup mortality is so high I wouldn't be surprised to see federal legislation banning shareholder suits against internet companies. We speculated, we lost. Welcome to Las Vegas. Go short some online stockbrokers and make it all back.

But if you do sue, don't forget that everyone with a CUSIP over the stated period gets a packet. I can be wrong, and I like when the mailman surprises me with little bitty settlement checks from the blue.

--Blair

There's a part of me that thinks...

that the thing to do is install security cameras over every door and promise castration by radial tire for the mooks who pull this crap:

10-year-old girl sexually assaulted on Disney property
http://www.wtsp.com/news/2001_03/13_disney_assault.htm

There's another part of me that knows you can't stop people from knocking on doors and you can't stop people from leaving their 10-year-old daughters alone in a locked hotel room.

But this story also has a fetid sort of smell to it. Did this guy just go around knocking on doors hoping to find little girls inside alone? How did he know she'd be there and nobody else would be? There's information needs to come out.

And then we get the torches and pitchforks and chase this pig down.

--Blair

Good? Bad? Or Just Plain Bizarre?

WSJ article on new Go[To].Com:
http://public.wsj.com/sn/y/SB984449404404211162.html

Infoseek, apparently, was the problem after all. Bloated, fungible, expensive, and in the end more embarassing and costly than the logo lawsuit.

There was an article a few days ago about Yahoo, I forget where, that indicated their new ad rate structure: $3-18 per thousand banner views. Remember when people were saying a single impression was worth several dollars? Gee. You think a three-orders-of-magnitude overestimation of revenue might have had something to do with the Internet Bubble?

BOTE SWAG: If the new, automated, nearly-zero-cost Go.Com can get a few million visitors a month, and each one clicks on 1-10 pages, with the average being 3, that's like 10 million banner views, or roughly $30-180 thousand dollars. And that's if the advertisers give Go.Com the same respect they give Yahoo. But it's a pessimistic, highly error-barred estimate. I hope.

As for the greenlight logos: go the **** away. We have a Disney-designed goodwill generator on every page, the one that should have been the Go logo right from the start, and adding a Goto logo would only muddy that effect.

But I wonder. Who held out the olive branch? Did someone at Disney eat crow and call Goto? Or did someone at Goto let the cool head of business get control over their bitter angels?

--Blair

It may not be any consolation but....


Of all the stuff in my port, DIS has held its value the best over the last year.d

DIG has been a dog, and even INTC is making me think twice about the future of the universe.

But getting some DIS for this DIG shit, that's a damned good deal.

--Blair
"YHOO? I wouldn't wipe my ass with YHOO."

I don't get what Eisner is doing this for.

Eisner Unloading Disney Internet Shares
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010215/bs/disney_eisner_dc_1.html

He must be on some skewed personal fiscal calendar and he needs the tax loss. He could just wait and convert these to 25-30K or so disney shares.

Anyone frame a copy of my analysis of Eisner's GO/DIG purchases? IIRC he did three, at prices of 30+, 20+, and maybe in the high teens. I'm guessing he averaged a $15 loss per share, or $2-2.5 million total.

--Blair

Re: Dignity in Internet LAYOFFS!

And, to compound their dignitarian attitude, in the 30 or so categories at jobs.fool.com, in the category "Marketing and Promotions", there was a lone posting for the position "VP Customer Value Management".

I guess it'd be too hard to retrain a java login applet developer to handle that one.

--Blair

See Beauty and the Beast on IMAX!

For all you Belle-heads, there's a new way to go:

Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" to hit Imax screens
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/010214/n14582340_2.html

Fantasia 2000 sold almost $65 million in IMAX tickets, despite being limited to 75 screens.

Maybe someone took a look at that and realized that a less arty, more popular, story-based movie, one with a heavy base of hyperdetailed computer graphical animation, would absolutely kill on the super-big screen.

--Blair

Being an Economic Force 101

Disney boosts California
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3PU5HM4JC&live=true&t...

--Blair

Ron, we hardly knew ye.

I got the impression that I was reading an obituary, and it is one, of sorts, for an era in Disney Entertainment.

Disney's showman takes his final bow
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-biz-logan021001.story?coll=orl%2Dbusiness%2Dheadlines

It will be interesting to see which way it goes from here. A younger talent could update the tone. A less experienced or confident person could cause a dip in the quality. It's a life goes on, vive Disney, kind of thing. You'd think they would have mentioned his successor in that article.

--Blair

CBS MarketWatch unclear on the concept.

These guys are perennially out of tune, but when people who write for a living can't tell the difference between present tense and past, almost ancient-history tense, it's time to killfile them:

Buffett dumps Disney shares
http://www2.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?nu=1&source=blq/yhoo&dist=yhoo&guid=%7B6...

Berkshire had divested about 80 percent of its stake in the world's No. 2 media company during the quarters ended Dec. 31, 1999, and March 31, 2000.

--Blair
"FLASH! Bell patents newfangled doohickey! Says 'Phone Home' will be on everyone's lips by harvest-time!"

Re: Hey now, wait just a minute Blair!

Yeah. It had four. I had to lay three of them off. I found it was just as efficient if I coagulated them into one.

--Blair
"Follow follow follow follow follow the yellow brick road."

I forgot to x-post this here

DIG holders are now effectively DIS holders, so this bears repeating:

DISNEY BEATS ESTIMATES; STOCK CLIMBS
http://www.investorshub.com/beta/read_msg.asp?message_id=45820

--Blair

DISNEY BEATS ESTIMATES; STOCK CLIMBS

Disney reported $0.16/sh v. $0.15/sh First-Call average estimate and $0.13/sh same-Q last year.

..."blew away our numbers":

Disney Earnings Rise on Parks, Movies
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010206/bs/leisure_disney_dc_5.html


Would someone please teach Bernie Schaffer how to read a chart:

Disney profit beats estimate by penny
http://www2.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?guid=%7BC918DCF0%2DDD83%2D44B4%2D89AA%2D943E300D1FFF...


Meanwhile, the WSJ accentuates problems already solved:

Walt Disney's Profit Drops 77%, Hurt By Struggling Internet Group
http://public.wsj.com/sn/y/SB981465827732055116.html

And The Standard (standard what?) tags along:

Disney's Profit Falls 77% on Web Woes, Accounting Changes
http://biz.yahoo.com/st/010206/21968.html


And hey, TheStreet.Com nailed the date! Good on ya, Cramer.

--Blair
"Lose the Bricks and Mortar and Huge Payroll, Disney Store..."

Scrutinize

Grandpadude, I see your watchdog, and raise you a denial:

No Sale: Disney Keeps Go.com Lists
http://www.adweek.com/daily/February/iq/iq022001-7.asp

--Blair

What's easier?

Predicting Disney's EPS or predicting Disney's announce date?

TheStreet.Com thinks that the latter is Tuesday, February 6.

http://www.thestreet.com/markets/earnings/1289359.html

--Blair
"Handicapping XFL games. Definitely easier."