All this talk of stock market rises and falls reminds me of my statistics module from last year.

The stock market is not ergodic (meaning that you do not tend to the properties of the system as you take more samples, I think, damn but that's a slippery one) nor is it second-order stationary (meaning that any average varies across time wildly). This can, of course, be proven, but it's similarly inevitable that now I've also forgotten that proof, 6 months on.

The differences of stock prices between days, however, are. They follow a completely random process i.e. you're just as likely to gain money as you are to lose it - which is why no one gets rich :-P

This leads to a distribution called a random walk - as the name suggests, it's a bit like the pattern a person would make if he just decided to randomly walk forward for a while.

Consider this when investing in the stock market :-D,
-Mole

Here's my response to the naysaying as I stated it in another forum (cut & pasted here to save time and energy):

Here's a direct quote from the Cnet article found here:

http://news.com.com/AMD+to+miss+revenue+target/2100-1006_3-6091448....

"AMD's revenue for the second quarter is expected to be $1.21 billion, a 52 percent increase compared with the same period last year."

Note that between last year and this year, AMD's anticipated revenue for the *same quarter* will have increased a whopping *52%*, which of course has absolutely ZERO to do with seasonal fluctuation, because we are talking about the *same quarter* in each year.

OK, this is a terrific improvement for AMD just over the span of one year. But, typically, the "analysts" are pissed that *their estimates* were off somewhat, and have published these "the sky is falling" articles to cover their tracks and try and avoid having to admit that although AMD is doing absolutely great at the moment, they themselves pretty much suck at foretelling the future.

[Edit for TR: remember how the analysts sucked back in 1998 when the great majority of them were writing AMD off as "doomed" and a "lost cause"...? I imagine they are still smarting from that analytical disaster...;) If they had understood the technologies AMD was in the process of making, and understood how the x86 world-wide cpu and core-logic markets were starved for competition, they'd never have made such egregious blunders when they did.]

I noticed that in each of the stories you linked [two from Forbes, one each from The Street and Reuters], *none* of the "analysts" made so much as a *mention* of the numbers quoted above from the CNet story. Indeed, the way these stories characterize the situation leaves just about no room at all for the reporting of the positive facts of the matter. This is exactly why I preach and preach and preach that "stock analysts" are literally buffoons when it comes to forecasting what technology companies will do in the future, simply because they have no understanding of the underlying technologies these companies make, and therefore almost no understanding of how the technology markets will react to those products during a given span of time. And, of course, like the blind leading the blind, they pretty much simply follow each other right into the ditch.

Personally, I am very pleased with AMD's progress in the last year, and I look forward to a time when stock analysts become qualified to talk about the products made by the companies they rate. I think the first lesson in wisdom for the routine stock analyst to absorb is to just give up on predicting the future--that's something that many people a lot smarter than they are have tried and failed to do historically. Just my two cents.

While we're discussing analysts' predictions, how's that AMD/ATI merger coming?

CNet says AMD expects revenue of $1.21 billion for the second quarter, 7% less than predicted by analysts and a whopping 9% below the previous quarter's $1.33 billion.

And to top of the good news, IIRC, AMD's Q2/06 had an extra week (14 vs. 13) of sales, too. Week for week, that puts the decline at a massive 15.5%.

And that's all just the beginning ...

All this pessimistic outlook is killing my stock. Please don't post articles to remind me about it. It looks like AMD is already starting $1.30 down today.

True, Q2 is down from Q1. However the real comparison should be against Q2 of last year. It's reported as being up 52%. That's a pretty healthy increase in my book!

No word yet on earnings (profit) though the real hit on that is going to happen in the coming quarter if all this price slashing comes to pass.

One bright spot for AMD: they're still selling lots of Opterons. IDC said first quarter x86 server sales were only up 6% (vs 1Q05) overall, but four-socket x86 sales were up 20%... and an awful lot of that was Opteron. With Woodcrest being 2-socket only, and server chips still very profitable, AMD has to hope that's going to continue.

Who would expect that Intel dumping P4's on the market would affect the competitions sales.