Qualcomm (QCOM) Continues to Roll Mon, Apr 22, 2019 Shares of Qualcomm (QCOM) are trading higher again to kick off the week after last week's monster surge in the wake of the royalty settlement with Apple (AAPL). In just the last four trading days, the stock has rallied more than 43%. Now, it's rare enough to see small cap stocks rally 40% in the span of four trading days, but for a mega-cap stock like QCOM, it's practically unheard of. In just the last four trading days, QCOM"s market cap has jumped by nearly $30 billion from $69 billion to just under $99 billion. In the process, it has passed stocks like CVS, Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), Caterpillar (CAT), Lowe's (LOW), Starbucks (SBUX), and American Express (AXP) among others. For QCOM itself, the move over the last four trading days is also reaching historical proportions. The chart below shows the historical rolling four-day rate of change for QCOM, and the current rate of 43.2% now ranks as the second all-time behind only the 53.2% four-day rally in April 1999. What makes that rally in 1999 even more impressive, though, was that even before it started, QCOM was already up 139% YTD after announcing in March of that year that it had settled all outstanding patent litigations with Ericsson related to CDMA technology. After that four day rally, QCOM was up more than 250% YTD and finished the year with a gain of more than 2,600%! The late 1990s sure were fun!
What are your thoughts on QCOM and 5G? Seems like one of the leaders and potential winners in the near future, since it would probably supply AAPL with 5G tech. Need to learn to do analysis first before I buy any stock, but bought QCOM last week on a gut feeling and since then its target price has been raised.
Made a new ATH (going all the way back to exactly $100 in January 2000) about a month ago on its last ER, and has moved steadily upward.
It's definitely time to start watching this. Microsoft has made noise about supporting ARM before and they've never fully committed to it. Current talk of the Snapdragon X Elite could be the same but it feels more real, this time. Microsoft talk feels lime more than just lip service for the purpose of leverage over Intel/AMD. We are now in the post-performance phase of the PC industry. Any machine made in the last three or four years is sufficiently powerful for 90% of users. The X Elite is 20% back from the leading edge of compute but 40% ahead on power efficiency. The future of desktop/laptop, at least part of it, could be ARM.
I normally stick to the business side and try to stay out of the clairvoyance business but I have some time to kill. If history can be used as a gauge, QCOM has either hit it's peak or is very close. From here, some drama will play out in the media, between Microsoft and Qualcomm, and the stock will plummet. If Qualcomm is picked up, and I believe there is a very real chance it will be (despite past overtures by Microsoft to ARM), Qualcomm will come bouncing back. Finally, there is no guarantee ARM will prevail in the handheld space, although it seems 40% likely (that is an extremely real chance). If ARM gains a foothold, you can bet Intel and AMD will throw in with their own ARM designs. In the case of Intel/AMD, they can throw in with better GPU, NPU, memory controllers, v-cache, and whatever ingredients they need to throw into the soup to crush Qualcomm like an HFT crypto trader's hopes and dreams. So, I predict this is the first of a two hump camel stock. I don't expect to own any QCOM, as I'm not super confident and don't want to get humped.
Intel is giving Snapdragon exclusive support for Copilot AI. Neither AMD nor Intel will Copilot capability. At least, initially. There is no word on when Copilot will be democratized, that I've found.
I think Snapdragon X Elite devices are being incorrectly positioned in the market as premium product. Also, there is essentially no volume at launch. I haven't tested it or even seen an ARM laptop but I hear the software is not yet stable. This launch has been pushed, as far as I can tell. In less than a month, AMD Strix will be released. Time will tell if there will be devices in the channel when Strix launches. If AMD has product for sale in mid July, it is going to be difficult to get people to pay more for a slower system with less resource and a new instruction set architecture. ARM will bring plenty of problems to Windows. I expect those problems will be addressed quickly and Strix is certain to have some issues of it's own but I expect far, far less. Time will tell but I suspect the Snapdragon laptop platform has been miss marketed.
