AMD: When Analyst Calls Are Night & Day (AMD, INTC)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) is taking a breather this morning after last night’s earnings.  At 9:26 AM EST we had shares trading down 5.9% at $8.46 on about 915,000 shares; right after the open at 9:43 AM EST down 7.8% at $8.29 on 8.5 million shares.  Here is the news on the earnings if you want to review that, but you have to love when analysts make night and day calls.  We are seeing that this morning… one “Strong Buy” and one “Sell” rating…. nice.  Even Jim Cramer piped in on this last night.

Broadpoint AmTech has the STRONG BUY saying it has leverage in the second half and the product company is under estimated.  AMD: A Strong Buy Now for Leverage in 2H10: Product Company Underestimated… The firm reiterated its BUY rating, but says STRONG BUY in the morning email, and the firm raised the price target to $14.00 from $12.00.  Revenue growth was driven by notebook units, server units, and GPUs.  AMD talked about flat or growing average sales prices, and the lack of transparency of a product company model will give investors a chance to accumulate shares.

Then there is a SELL rating in a downgrade from “Hold” at Auriga after a 69% move since the Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) settlement…. its target is $6.00.   It also represents a P/E multiple of 26-times based on Auriga’s FY10 pro-forma (excluding AMD’s share of GF’s losses) EPS estimate of $0.23, while Auriga has an estimated 12-times FY10 consensus $1.80 EPS.  Auriga noted, “Bulls may harp on the supposed value-creation of the event, but we believe that investors are likely to re-focus on fundamentals. Our work suggests that AMD has a relatively weak product cycle in CPU and is unlikely to regain lost market share near term…”

Hell, even Jim Cramer last night told a caller, “Sell AMD now and take your profits and roll them into Intel!”….

It is very frequent that investors and analysts will look at the same data and have a different interpretation.  During the great bull run-up we saw from March to December in 2009, it was frequent that you could just tally up the news in an all negative manner  and still just expect to see the words at the end, “Therefore you should buy the stock…”.  The chip and processor war continues.  Stay tuned.

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JON C.OGG
JANUARY 22, 2010

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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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