World+Dog waits for Nasdaq opening

Crash Register The whole world and its doggie are waiting to see what will happen on Nasdaq when the stock market opens any minute or hour or so now, but the fall out on Friday had all the signs of a panic run. That generated column inches that possibly reached to the Moon over the weekend but the indiscriminate rush to get out of high tech stocks covers a multitude of different firms and all with their own agenda. Let's look at the stocks and firms we normally cover and see what the realities as opposed to the fantasies might be. We'll update this story after the market shuts this evening. CPQ Compaq's share price fell by $1.625 on Friday to close at $25. That means that we've nearly lost our bet with Terry Shannon of Shannon knows Compaq. We thought the shares would rise steadily steeply to coincide with the introduction of its Wildfire technology in May. It's still undervalued in our opinion. AMD It didn't fare too badly in Friday's fallout, falling by $5 to close at $66. It's still doing considerably better than the $16 it bumbled along for months last year. INTC Intel fell by $10.625 to close at $110.5. Not bad, Chipzilla, not bad. Its Q results are out tomorrow and, let's face it, as the British Prime Minister Tony Blair says too much, it's a good long term bet. It's already said its going to be a building blocks Internet style firm, de-emphasising its microprocessor role. How can it lose in the long run? RMBS Cough. Rambus fell to $156.25 on Friday, a drop of over $46. But it, more than many other tech stocks, fell steeply over the week. So will it reach $500 now, as Morgan Stanley forecast a week or two back. Not on your nellie. SUNW Sun Microsystems only closed slightly down at $76.5. But then it had posted a 94 profit boost on sales of its non-Intel servers the day before. It's selling oodles of them. So, we'll see whether the Nasdaq turns into a Nosedive later in the day, or whether some investors realise that all of the above, essentially infrastructure companies, are going to do OK in the end... ®