From Kopin Tan's options column in this week's Barron's:
Qualcomm's puts traded actively under the specter of continued feebleness. The recent rally may have lifted 91% of the S&P 500 stocks above their 50-day moving averages, but Qualcomm was among those that had missed the ride, Natexis Bleichroeder's technical analyst John Roque points out. From March 12 through to Thursday, Qualcomm fell 13.5% while the Nasdaq surged 16.5%. Roque believes that is another reason Qualcomm is a better sale than it is a buy: If the wireless technology stock was overlooked when buyers swamped the market, what are its odds should the market pull back?
From March 12 through May 8, IDCC climbed from $13.20 to $23.38, or by 77.1%, while Nasdag rallied 16.5% and QCOM dropped 13.5%!
205 institutions own 28% of a small cap/mid-cap IDCC while 1,995 institutions own 73% of a dividend-paying big cap QCOM. If the funds flow continue to move away from big cap growth funds to mid-cap growth funds then IDCC is likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries. QCOM is a fixture in many big cap growth funds while IDCC is still making its way from the small cap fund world to the mid-cap fund world.
My float analysis suggests that IDCC should gradually increase its float to the 75M to 100M range to accomodate this heightened institutional interest especially if IDCC accomplishes its apparent goal of making the numbers settle down this year to a useful baseline from which to judge future growth.
That's one of the reasons I want to see IDCC continue to highlight their M&A strategy and their $1B+ cash/stock war chest. It increases its appeal to a fee-starved Wall Street and, at the very least, start their internal due diligence which must include a critical analysis of why both Nokia-IDCC and QCOM-Ericsson were settled in early 1999, a few months before the 3G Patent Platform was inaugurated in Paris in June 1999.<g>
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