indeed. intc looking like its going to put in 3 black crows on the daily. of course, that's often good for a bounce before continuing also ... ===============================================================
Hi TJ, Speaking of INTC, did you see Fleck's comments w/r to them, Dell and AMD that was posted here last night? If accurate, that would be something worth crowing about. <g>
"Trickle-down trouble in tech and Intel Back to present times, and technology in particular, I wanted to spend a minute on Intel (INTC, news, msgs), a company that has evolved to where it is basically in the marketing business. I have made no secret of my belief that Intel is in trouble, both in the near term and long term. (See my April 12 column, "Is Seagate's swoon bad news for Intel?")
My longer-term conclusion has been that if Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, news, msgs) is widely perceived to have swooped Intel on the high end, that perception will do a lot to undercut Intel's reputation as a technology leader. That will affect not only the company’s earnings but the price-to-earnings ratio and expectations of future profitability and growth.
Along that line, Intel's halo came in for a little tarnishing last Tuesday. According to work done by an analyst at Susquehanna Research (I'll give the guy the benefit of the doubt and not call him a dead fish, since I haven't seen his work before): "Channel checks indicate that Dell (DELL, news, msgs) is designing two dual-processor servers based on AMD's Opteron processors."
Intel bulls disagree that Dell will ever endorse AMD's products, but I believe it is only a matter of time. Dell is facing competitive pricing pressures from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, news, msgs), and customers are beginning to demand the Opteron products. When Dell endorses the Athlon and the Opteron, it's essentially going to be game over for Intel's image. This will, as I said before, impact its earnings and multiple. I continue to believe that the time bomb is ticking away for Intel."#msg-3488861
M. Ramsey King Securities, Inc. Tuesday July 6, 2004 – Issue 2952
"Independent View of the News"
Only intractabulls cannot see the weakness in Friday’s employment report. Non-farm jobs were less than half the forecast. And what do intractabulls and Bush apologists say? They blame the soft number on ‘seasonal adjustments’! Well, we’ve been hoping that they would open that door.
112k non-farm jobs were created in June according to the BLS; 182k came from the CES Birth/Death Rate – the guesstimate of jobs that BLS thinks small businesses create. Without the 182k phantom jobs from the B/D Rate, there would’ve been a loss of 70k jobs in June. In Q2, which is the strongest quarter of job creation (see the CES Birth/Date Rate for the implied seasonal tendency of Q2 to have the strongest job growth), the CES Birth/Death Rate model provided 647k jobs. For Q1 BLS shows a loss of 33k jobs. http://www.bls.gov/web/cesbd.htm
Please note that in July, BLS will delete 83k jobs via the B/D Rate model. Therefore the B/D Rate model differential for July will be 182k (June) and 83k or 265k jobs. The B/D Rate methodology mandates the 265k jobs must be created in July just to negate the m/m B/D adjustment. In Q3 of 2003, with 8.3% GDP, BLS counted only 74k jobs created in the B/D Rate.
SurePayroll, the US’s 5th largest payroll provider and largest online payroll provider, says small business job growth was 2.6% in Q2 vs. Q1. Both employee and independent contractor averages increased. However, independent contractor use increased more than in Q1. Most importantly, salaries were down on average in Q2, in the quarter that usually has the best job growth. http://www.surepayroll.com
The employment report exhibits dramatic weakness beyond the headline jobs number. A) Wages increased 0.1%, but hours worked declined. This truncated the average weekly paycheck. "Average weekly earnings declined by 0.5 percent over the month to $525.84. Over the year, average hourly earnings grew by 2.0 percent, and average weekly earnings increased by 1.7 percent." B) "The number of unemployed persons, 8.2 million, was essentially unchanged in June…Total employment was 139.0 million in June, and the employment-population ratio--the proportion of the population age 16 and over with jobs--was about unchanged at 62.3 percent. The civilian labor force participation rate also was little changed at 66.0 percent. (See table A-1.)" C) Job growth is still focused in low-paying gigs – "health care and social assistance continued to grow, adding 30,000 jobs over the month…Employment in professional and technical services increased by 23,000, with small gains in several component industries, including management and consulting services, architectural and engineering services, and computer systems design and related services. Employment in temporary help services continued to trend up in June …Transportation and warehousing added 19,000 jobs in June." Employment in ‘associations’ increased 11k!
"The average workweek for production or nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 0.2 hour in June to 33.6 hours, seasonally ad- justed. The workweek in manufacturing fell by 0.3 hour to 40.8 hours…(See table B-2.)"
"The index of aggregate weekly hours of production or nonsupervisory work-ers on private nonfarm payrolls declined by 0.6 percent in June to 99.6 (2002=100). The manufacturing index fell by 0.8 percent over the month to 94.6. (See table B-5.)" http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.
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