This week at Barrons – Aug 2021 - Chips and Dips
This week at Barrons – Aug 2021 – On the week, healthcare utilities and corporate debt did well, and Natural Resources did poorly. The indexes were all slightly down. What sayeth Randall Forsythe? Much without resonance about Afghanistan. Ten year T-Notes have settled into a range, he remarks, which is true at the time of this posting.
Barrons says The Chip Shortage Looks Like the Oil Shortage of the 1970s. This always made sense to me: That chips were the new oil. Nevertheless, that didn’t mean there was easy money to be made playing those stocks. AMD has been amazing – even more so, NVIDIA. Why wouldn’t both have big futures? On the analog side, Analog Devices has assembled the best in the genre with buys of Linear Tech and Maxim (pending). Piper Sandler pegs it at $190 a share. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index was down 2.02% for the week.
The European realm
has seemed up and down all year, and somewhat lagging. That makes it surprising
to discover how well the French market has done. Barrons points out through the myopia in a
bubble darkly the act that France, not exactly the hotbed of innovation anddisruption, is outperforming Nasdaq so far this year. MSCI France index has
returned 19.5% year to date.
The quest to successfully value a stock remains central to the investment quest. Never easy, but much harder as equities become the main game, and high-tech growth charges ahead. Barrons interview with Rafe Resendes is of interest in that he shares some of a formula:
Most quantitative-value models don’t properly account for the relationship between company investments—such as in research and development, or technology—and long-term profitability, says Resendes. A better way to measure intrinsic value, he says, is to ask whether management is creating or destroying value, and to what degree.
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