Monthly Archives: February 2007

A Buying Opportunity in the New World Economy MegaShift

28
Feb 07
As I noted in yesterday’s Radar Report, Omniture (OMTR) reported earnings after the close. While they guided for revenues of $26 million to $27 million in the March quarter, with earnings of zero to one cent a share, the Street consensus was two cents. Omniture also guided the yearly estimate to $128 million to $130 million in sales, with pro forma profits of seven cents to nine cents a share. Again, the Street’s consensus was higher at 17 cents. The stock initially dropped $1.50 in yesterday’s after market trading on the news. And it dropped even further today, down $2.88...

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Don’t Get Flopped by the Drop

27
Feb 07
The market is down sharply today, mostly on fears of a slowdown in the U.S. Those fears were heightened by ex-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan musing about a possible recession in the U.S., and the good economic numbers released today did little to hold back the selling tide. On the same recession fears, Chinese stock markets had their worst drop in years last night. I expect the preliminary December-quarter GDP growth of 3.5% to be revised down to 2.7%, which is not low enough to believe that the Fed is about to cut interest rates. But neither are they about to...

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Has the Biotech Game Changed?

22
Feb 07
If the market is not as strong as I think it will be for the next several months, the more stable stocks like foods, beverages and healthcare should do better than the more cyclical stocks like computers and electronics. That’s typical. But if the market keeps going up, as I expect, then the cyclical stocks should outperform. That’s also typical. But an interesting point is that in the past, biotech stocks often did OK in mild down markets, where they were treated as healthcare stocks, and in up markets, where they were treated as emerging growth stocks. That may be...

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The Technology of Better Health

15
Feb 07
Technology is changing rapidly, and so is the way people use it. Ask anyone under 20 this question: “If you had to give up one of these, which would it be: Email, text messaging or Internet Messaging?” Virtually every one will say: “Email.” Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. People want to communicate with one another in the fastest and most efficient manner. Luckily for us, as Alan Kay, an Apple Fellow, once said: “If computing was a baseball game, we would be in the first inning.” Companies are throwing money right and left at projects to develop new technologies...

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Back to a New Energy Technology Favorite

12
Feb 07
Hello, again. I’m now back from the Money Show. And while it would have been easy to forget about the stock market and relax in the Florida sunshine, I still kept my eyes pealed for any developments in our holdings. So, today I’m writing to tell you about two exciting opportunities that we now have for investment. Silicon Image (SIMG), last Thursday, reported their December-quarter earnings, which fell three cents short. So, on Friday, the stock fell $2.93 from its Thursday close of $12.17. Let’s see, that’s a Price/Disappointment ratio of 97.7X. Let’s hope they give us that kind of...

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Back to Basics: The Semiconductor Industry

08
Feb 07
Greetings from the Money Show! While I’ve been meeting many of you at presentations and booth times here in Orlando, earnings reports have been coming thick and fast. And the S&P 500 is consolidating at high levels in preparation for an assault on the all-time highs of March 2000. As I said last week, the biggest story of the next five to ten years — and maybe of our whole investment lifetimes, making the dot-com mania look like a blip — is going to be the accelerating decline in the value of the dollar. You simply must reposition all of...

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Another Step in the Right Direction

01
Feb 07
Wow! This is a week to remember — the biggest breakthrough in the production of semiconductors in 40 years — real Nobel Prize stuff. I moved to California from the East Coast in 1968, a year before a private company named Intel began using polysilicon to make transistor gates, which determine whether the transistor is on (1) or off (0). In 1970, our investment management company made a venture investment in Intel, and I have followed the company ever since. Polysilicon is the material that Moore’s Law is based on — Gordon Moore’s prediction in the mid-’60s that chips would...

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