Tuesday, March 28, 2006

MRVL Drops again - 4.3%

I am reading the tea leaves and am completely baffled.

MRVL SPECIFIC BEHAVIOR
MRVL is down almost 30% since January while its peers are down ~10%. While BRCM is down 2.5% today, MRVL is down 2x that rate. Sector rotation accounts for only some of this behavior. In any case, less than a month after showing great results, the stock continues to slide.
What is going on, I wonder.

Using technical measurements (MACD and Slow Stoch), MRVL is amazingly oversold. In fact, it is well below it's 50 day and 100 day moving averages and almost at its 200 day moving average. And it's not a shorting cycle either - shorts are <3% of total shares.

Their P/E is lower than most of their peers despite having better margins and growth.

I next looked at their core customers:
Apple - business is booming
Seagate - business is booming. One of their customers reported extremely strong sales forecast. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060323/xyratex_stock.html?.v=2
Sure, it could be PC sales jitters, but doubtful. Plus MRVL has been sliding for 2 months.
Tape drive and hard drive companies (Digital, Toshiba, Samsung and Fujitsu) - should be fine
I think that MRVL must be missing some big wins and word is getting out. For example, According to some chatter on the street (and who knows how reliable the chatter is): MRVL's chips are not performing well as they try to enter the wireless market.
Gigabit Ethernet - last I checked, networking sales were strong

Bottom line: high volume on down days is a sign of institutional pullouts.
I can build the case for why this stock is a screaming buy. Business is up 50% Y/Y and earnings are up 200%. Yet the stock is up only 40% during this period.
But you can't fight large institutional sellers until they are done over selling. I suspect that this time is almost here.
I want to know why they are slipping before I make any other suggestion.
One thing is clear - BRCM has outperformed them the last 3 months by almost 40%.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home