A Nostalgic Stroll Down Our Various Qualcomm Message Boards' Memory Lane ...
Come, let's stroll
Stroll across the floor
Come, let's stro-oh-oh-oll
Stroll across the floor
Now turn around, [warrior] baby
Let's stroll once more
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Nostalgia: QCOM Eleven Year Price History from 1998 (Split Adjusted)
Calendar Year 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
============= ===== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ====== ======
High Price 4.21 92.52 100.00 44.69 26.67 27.43 44.99 46.60 53.01 47.72 56.88
Low Price 2.36 3.27 25.75 19.16 11.61 14.79 26.67 32.08 32.76 35.23 28.16
Year End Price 3.24 88.06 41.09 25.25 18.20 26.97 42.40 43.08 37.79 39.35 35.83
QCOM Stock Splits
====================
08/04: 2-for-1 split
12/99: 4-for-1 split
05/99: 2-for-1 split
02/94: 2-for-1 split
Maurice,
Below is an excerpt from a post in progress in response to one of our mates who posted to me in another forum and who made the somewhat erroneous statement "Such nostalgia, sigh. Ramsey has been gone for longer than he was present,"
>> Perhaps we should nostalgacize for a moment and do a sanity check on the statement you made (above) about Ramsey to see whether your math is in error or your facts are..
Maurice Winn (aka Mquarice, Mq, etc.), seasoned cyberwarrior extraordinair and grand master of the rant, established the 1st CDMA, Qualcomm message board on Silicon Investor in early April 1996, and so far as I'm aware that was the 1st Qualcomm message board established on the Internet and it focused for most of its early going on the initial IS-95 cdmaOne market tests and trials at Airtouch in SoCal, BAM in Trenton NJ. Hutchinson Wampoa in Hong Kong, and STK in Korea.
Maurice's real life friend Ramsey Su who joined SI on January 1 1996 3 months before Mq was (excluding Mq) the 3rd poster to the board and he made his 1st of many posts (excluding those not lost) to it on April 11, 1996, 2 days after Mq established (or actually renamed) the board and about a month before I bumped into it and started looking over the shoulders of its early occupants even though I hadn't yet anted up my modest SI dues or invested in QCOM which I started to track seriously from both a potential investing perspective and a vocational matter in November 1994 after 1st seeing CDMA demonstrated in AT&T Labs in NJ. Ramsey was a regular poster to that board throughout its life cycle which began to draw to a close within a few months of Craig Schilling founding of the QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range SI board in September 1996. Almost 1400 of CDMA, Qualcomm's 1793 posts to date were originated in 1996 while 300 were added in 1997, and 100 since then by a few of us that occasionally keep CDMA, Qualcomm's lights burning with small talk and banter. Ramsey made the 1st of his 1200 posts to Craig's QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range) SI board on November 8, 1996
While 1996 had opened with only a handful of cdmaOne commercial subscribers (virtually all on Hutchinson Wampoa's Hong Kong Network) it closed the year with slightly over 1 million, and although well over 90% of those were on SKT's network in Korea where IS-95 had been successfully commercialized due to an around the clock effort by Qualcomm, Samsung, and SKT (in particular), in the US 360° Communications, AirTouch, then Sprint PCS and finally Bell Atlantic NYNEX Mobile, had finally commercially launched cdmaOne. Despite this QCOM stock which had opened 1996 at $2.60 (spli adjusted)) closed the year at $2.49, down from its '96 open of $2.60 and Qualcomm message boards still were relatively sparsely populated.
In 1998 14,000 posts were added to SI's primary Qualcomm board by an increased number of posters as the ITU became increasingly serious about selecting a sanctioned 3G IMT-2000 radio access network technology with Qualcomm (and newly formed 3GPP2's) CDMA for FDD spectrum and ETSI's and 3GPP's competing W-CDMA FDD technology being the leading candidates. What Ken Woo of ATT late in the year dubbed the "Virtual Holy War" was being acted out in the background and the principle protagonists were Ericsson and Qualcomm who had been litigating over IPR for several years. A significant event took place on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor day, December 7, 1998. On that day the ITU warned that "CDMA-based RTT proposals for IMT-2000 could be excluded from further consideration if an IPR stalemate [was] not resolved by the year end." and that if it wasn't they would "only consider RTT technologies for IMT-2000 based on TDMA technology" ...
itu.int
In that year QCOM had traded as high as $4.50 and closed at $3,16 [up $0.67, +27% YoY]. In anticipation of an Ericsson/Qualcomm settlement QCOM rose steadily in Q1 1999. They settled on March 25 ...
latam.qualcomm.com
The prior evening QCOM closed at $5.45 (+73% CYTD] and it closed March at $7.77 (+146% CYTD]. The Ericsson accord -- branded as 'Ericsson's capitulation' by dedicated cyberwarrirs -- was the defining event that attracted a flood of new QCOM investors and a new breed of posters, many of whom had little regard for netiquette, to SI's Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) board and others that had been founded more recently on Yahoo, Raging Bull, and TMF (initiated in April 1999) Regardless of persuasion we all caught a big bluebird on Wednesday December 29 of that year when Walter Piecyk, then with Paine Webber placed a $1,000 price target on QCOM ...
Qualcomm Climbs by $30 Billion After Comments: The developer of mobile telephone technology saw its value rise by more than 30 percent, or $30 billion, Wednesday after a bullish analyst report said the meteoric stock could hit $1,000 a share next year. The San Diego-based company's stock soared $156 to $659 a share after the comments by brokerage firm PaineWebber re-stoked the raging investment fire that has made Qualcomm one of the Nasdaq's best-performing stocks of 1999. The surge continued in the after-hours market, with Qualcomm trading around $700. The rise followed weeks of double-digit daily gains that have added tens of billions of dollars to Qualcomm's market capitalization, which now stands at nearly $128 billion, more than new economy darling Yahoo! Inc.'s $119 billion. [AOL News]
On Tuesday 12/28/99 QCOM opened at [SA] $65.97, dipped to $58.75, and closed at $62.88. Walter P's bluebird hit the next day propelling QCOM to a Wednesday closing high of $82.38 on 117,999,200 shares traded. traded as high as $$2.52 on Thursday on 128,995,200 shares traded, closing the year Friday at $88.06 on 72,674,200 shares with the Nasdaq CI closing the year at 4069. QCOM opened Y2K on 1/3/2000 at $99.63 and shortly after briefly hit $100, closing at 89.66 on 91,350,400 shares before its skid began the next day,
SI's QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range (now Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) board accumulated almost 40,000 new posts in '99 from longs, shorts, in between, and outright whackadoodles.. Chit-chat and food fights (the most celebrated of which featured Mq v, the mixed gender day-traders and which also resulted in his temporary suspension from SI -- as opposed to civil but heated debate often became the order of the day and wading through the all too many posts that added little or nothing to an individual's mobile wireless knowledge base had become an onerous task and a time waster.
For the benefit of those of us that continued to retain a long view of Qualcomm and QCOM, Herr Su founded SI's The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 Company board on May 21, 1999 with "a few simple rules" (No Cheerleading, No Stock Quotes, No Off Topic Posts, and No Discussion/Disclosure Of Personal Holdings). After SI created the option of creating (or converting established boards to) moderated boards we decided to keep the board unmoderated, but as new posters with little respect for all or some of the established rules wandered on to the board in mid-2000 Ramsey established SI's Qualcomm Moderated Thread whose title added please read rules before posting. The header noted: "This is a discussion forum, not a chat room. This forum will be moderated by a panel" and it added three new rules: Use Private Message for All "Thank You for Good Posts" And Messages of No Common Interest; Please Use Discretion In Linking Or Copying Articles That May Have Marginal Correlation to QCOM; and Please Ignore Rather Than Debate IQ-Challenged Posters).
A few weeks later in Ramsey's original Qualcomm 'rules' boards post 13526, Eric Jhonsa, now a TMF writer quipped ...
"And so this once-great board fades into oblivion, put to an end by the discontinuous innovation known as Ramsey Su's Moderated Qualcomm Thread. It closes not with a bang, but..." .
To which John Goren replied:
"The board was killed by too many stupid posts. Will the last one out please close the door.".
As will happen, and while for some time most posters to the new Rules board observed the new protocol, gradually many migrated over from Craig's old board and some were less diligent in observance of them. In addition others who had initially posted in other forums elsewhere were attracted, and some apparently never bothered to read Ramsey's Rules of Order. The cumulative post count at 2000 end was 5848, 17696, 2001, 30591 in 2002, 38672 in 2003, and 43955 in 2004. Ramsey himself had gotten somewhat tired of cat herding and lost interest in QCOM but he continued to post on his own board well into 2004. More frequently he began to post on Real Estate boards.
Ramsey made his last visit to the 2nd board he founded on SI on 04-30-09, but in October 2008 he made the following post {his 1st since October 2007) on it:
Hello all, greetings from Methoni. I got the following message from "Dave".[Are you moderating here? If not, let's get someone to replace you. Way too much political noise there.]. I nominate slacker as the replacement. Ramsey
A week later he reappeared and posted to Slacker:
OK, it is official then. My powers as thread Nazi have been stripped. I wish you all the best. It seems decades ago that we had one of those shareholders lunches.Thank you slacker for taking over. Just a word of advice, when in doubt, just ban Maurice and Koplik. :-). Ramsey
Craig's old unmoderated QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range board still served a valuable purpose. It was a place for many who observed all or at least some of Ramsey's Rules to post in a manner and fashion outside the protocols of the Moderated board, and some of its old constituents also posted there as an alternative. On 07/16/2006 with its cumulative post count standing at 143,591 Quincy (a regular Qualcomm poster from the early SI days) commenced moderation noting:
This subject is now moderated for the sole purpose of preventing a long stream of jibberish with no educational purpose to the discussion at hand.
For all practical purposes that sounded the death knell for the board although some 8,000 posts were subsequently made there in the almost 5 subsequent years. In the last 15 months, however, it attracted only 8 posts.
One Qualcomm board of some consequence has been added since. In July 2007 'manalagi' (Paul) founded The New QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range board "a fun gathering place for people investing in Qualcomm" and home of the annual Toaster contest. While it is moderated its rules are somewhat the antithesis of Ramsey's as more recently slightly modified by Slacker: Cheerleading is OK; Stock quote is fine; Discussion of short term price movement is all right; Off topics posts are on topics; Discussion/disclosure of personal holdings if you wish. Paul does add one important rule: No flaming, No personal attack, no foul language, no spam.
For the ultimate in unmoderation and only loosely connected to Qualcomm there is. of course, your The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread founded way back on 9/7/1999 ...
Subject 30581
That was an exhausting stroll, but almost as much fun as doing it in real life to the Diamond's rendition back in 1957.
One final note. In late 1998 I folded my long standing NOK position accumulated on dips since its '94 US IPO on NYSE and appreciated 300+% to establish my initial QCOM position. Although I was an SI member for several years prior I never posted on Qualcomm boards while I was still a foot soldier in the mobile wireless industry because of numerous NDAs my company was party to several of which I had originated including those at BAM, NYNEX, BAM-NYNEX, Omnipoint, and Sprint PCS. My 1st posts were made to Craig's boards in early '99 and you were the 1st individual to welcome me by PM shortly afterward. Thank you.
Cheers,
- Eric - |
