Monthly Archives: April 2008

It’s Earnings Time!

24
Apr 08
Are we in the thick of earnings season, or what? EMC (EMC), Silicon Image (SIMG), Zhone Technologies (ZHNE) and Harmonic (HLIT) reported earlier this week. We have seven companies reporting today, with Motorola (MOT) first up before the opening, and SiRF Technology (SIRF), Cnet (CNET), Packeteer (PKTR), Affymetrix (AFFX), Amgen (AMGN) and QuickLogic (QUIK) all teed up for this afternoon. There’s also a little company named Microsoft I’ll be listening to, and tomorrow we get to hear from QLT (QLTI). Next Tuesday we get Rochester Medical (ROCM), followed by three more on Wednesday: ViroPharma (VPHM), Sequenom (SQN) and Akamai Technologies...

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Hold Affymetrix

15
Apr 08
Affymetrix (AFFX) announced a first-quarter revenue shortfall last night, and the stock is down 37% to just over $10 as I write. The company said that excluding the $90 million patent lawsuit payment they were awarded from Illumina, they earned approximately $80 million in revenues compared to the consensus expectation for $92.5 million. For the year, they lowered their revenue forecast (again excluding the Illumina payment) from a range of $415 million to $435 million to a range of $400 million to $420 million. The consensus forecast was for $421.1 million. The company attributed the shortfall primarily to lower research...

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Market Shifts and Consolidates

10
Apr 08
In spite of a ton of bad news, including big layoffs at Advanced Micro Devices, negative earnings preannouncements, more bad housing news and Fed Chairman Bernanke saying we may be in a recession, the market’s action from Wednesday, April 2 through Monday was the very definition of a flat, drifty consolidation. Tuesday and Wednesday’s dip back to 1355 might have reminded you of something I wrote in last week’s Radar Report: “Otherwise, expect a brief dip back down to 1355 as the market builds up the energy to surge ahead to the 1440 level.” Date S&P 500 Close Monday, March...

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It’s All Uphill From Here

03
Apr 08
Monday marked the end of the worst quarter for stock prices since the September 2002 quarter, with the S&P 500 down 9.9% and small capitalization and technology stocks doing worse. But that September 2002 quarter marked a loss of almost 18% as we approached the end of the tech bear market. It’s hard to stay unemotional during a three-month, 9.9% (or worse) decline, and that is of course exactly why these declines snowball. But listening to the market instead of CNBC can make all of the difference. I still believe what I said in last week’s Radar Report. I think...

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