Michael Dell Buys Dell Stock: No One’s Fooled

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Michael Dell bought $100 million of Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) stock. He clearly wants the market to believe he has faith in the health of the company he founded. His action may actually take the firm’s shares higher, temporarily.

The purchase will mean much less to the market than Dell might hope. The PC company is still viewed as a maker of small computers and servers without the software and services businesses that rivals like Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have.

While HP and IBM shares have done well this year, Dell’s have not.

Michael Dell already owns 230 million shares of Dell stock. His $100 million investment is extremely modest and will certainly not make Wall Street ignore the firm’s many weaknesses.

Dell is not only late to some of the highly profitable markets that its rivals now control. It is so late that it will be costly to get market share, if it can get any at all.

Michael Dell will always be blamed for being too slow to realize that the tech market moved away from his company’s focus long ago.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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