Market Management; Remember DDD?

Yesterday I made a post about the Semiconductor sector’s technical market leadership. There are other considerations as well, not least of which is my own background in manufacturing and in particular, the state of the Semi Equipment segment within the general Semi sector. I am not trying to hype anything, I am trying to be logical and if the technical and fundamental aspects marry up, there will be a trade here.

The technicals show that leadership is still in its trend channel per the link above. They also show a nominal SOX index that dropped hard to around a point where those fundamentally bullish would at least start buying. We have previous history (up to May) showing very strong Equipment sector bookings and we await new data to be released later this month.

In managing markets, you have got to have themes in play, plans extrapolated from those themes and above all else, an inclination to admit when you are wrong and revise those plans. For now, we are on a Semi plan.

One plan that never needed a revision was the ‘Wall Street and associated media were printing up a big plastic model of HYPE for investors to suck on’ that I harped upon continually. This site, due to my manufacturing background and familiarity with 3D Printing and Citron Research with a 3D Systems-specific bear view were the only places I can recall that called this promotion a scam at the heights of the bull frenzy.

3D Printing; no Barrier to Future Losses for Investors

Stratasys is the ‘best of breed’ in the sector and it too has been destroyed from the bad old days when the promotion was running full steam. The stock market is higher than it was in February of 2014 and yet this entire sector sought out its true value just as the best laid plan thought it would.

My point is not to chirp and harp (well, maybe a little) but rather to continue to expose the b/s that runs 24/7 in this casino. In October 2014 we had a hysteria in the Semiconductor sector centered around some stupid comments by the CEO of Microchip Semi. He issued a PR talking about soft forward business and then the media popped its load falling all over itself spreading the grim news about the view of this key ‘canary in a coal mine’ company (hint: a better ‘canary’ is actually the Equipment group, which supplies the chip makers).

The point? Hype is everywhere *, in the micro (company-specific like Microchip Semi (MCHP); no pun intended), the macro (Yellen now blabbing about rate hikes still to take place in 2015 after some doofus at the Fed used the little blip of a correction last week to talk about pushing rates out to 2016) and it comes in positive and negative form.