One step at a time.
I completely agree; I still find myself feeling extremely cautious as well (of course, as a battered and bruised Intel long, you'll have to excuse me if my cynicism continues unabated).
Intel's Q1 warning really has me spooked. All the focus is on the Intel vs AMD battle, but all the math points to this quarter suffering from rising inventories and a general slowdown, and that could be bad news.
My worst fear is that this cycle has peaked and is on its way back down, and Intel has missed out completely because of crappy products. If that's true, then I fear that we might not reap the rewards of this much improved product line until 2007 at the earliest. And when I say "reap the rewards", I'm only talking about gaining back GMs and EPS. I've never seen such negative market sentiment for INTC, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a 6-month lag in the market once the fundamental business finally starts humming again.
As a counter to my worst fear, my best hope is that this "slowdown" is nothing but lots of really smart buyers noticing that if they simply wait 6 months to make a purchase, they can get higher performance, lower power, and a 64-bit OS that will provide obselescence protection an order of magnitude better than today's offerings.
Either way, I'll continue to hold my INTC, and continue to dollar-cost-average into it at these depressed prices. But after the Q1 warning, I'm expecting the worst this year.
Long term (2008 and beyond) is a different story. Given what's coming down the pipe, I can't think of a bigger no-brainer than INTC if your timeline is a few years out. That's what I'm betting on, anyway...
