Hi Cary,
I haven't been very active lately on SI but have just heard about your new thread.
The discussion seems interesting, but it reminds me a bit of ham radio -- engineers talking to other engineers. This is OK though I'm not an engineer but an investor, and I come here to share ideas about making money -- in other words for the investor side of SI more than the silicon side.
You say it's different this time and if I understand correctly, it's because everyone is now consuming this technology. It has gone mass market. That is obviously true, but it is still not driving great sales gains for pick and shovel manufacturers. Why not may be an interesting question to some, but I am more focused on looking for opportunities wherever they may happen to be, not just in semi-equips or analog semis.
It sounds like you are still mainly concerned with the same 8 companies you were interested in in 2003, 4 of which comprised the 8 that interested you in 1996. But are these really the most interesting companies in the market for making money going forward, or is it merely that you are extremely reluctant to invest in companies that you haven't followed for ten years? I have nothing against your extremely high standards of due diligence In fact I find them laudatory. But I am a top-down investor and only want to be in industries that I think will outperform, and only in their outperformance phase.
You mention the overestimation of demand recently by NAND manufacturers, but it's better late than never. Flesh-eating tablets, I mean flash-eating tablets, have appeared in the nick of time driving SanDisk from 5 to 50 over the past 18 months. AMAT also went from 5 to 50 once, but that was from October 2008 to March 2010, when SNDK went from 3 to 85.
I wonder whether SNDK is an interesting company from your perspective? Does it have sustainable competitive advantages and high barriers to entry? Have you studied it long enough to have formed a serious opinion as to its merits and demerits?
Sam |
