Overheard On The Street
Here’s what they’re saying at mid-day:
Tim Heekin, Director of Trading, Thomas
Weisel Partners: “We’re pretty much seeing the hangover from Tuesday. You
had a lot anticipated news for the optical stocks yesterday as well as people
being disappointed with the guts of what Greenspan was saying. I think it’s
followed through to today’s action, and there’s just a lot of cross-currents in
the optical space. They’ve been a pretty dominant group within the market, and
there’s some hangover in GLW and Nortel. But I think we’re pretty close to big
support levels in the Composite and the S&Ps. In the S&Ps we’re looking
at 1300 even as a big number. They got as low as 1308, but we were looking for
1314 and then 1300.
In the Nasdaq Comp, a big, big level that we have been eyeballing is this
2280-2290 level. We’ve been trading most of the morning 100 points away from
that, but I think you’re closer to a really strong buy spot than anything. I
think your downside is minimal here. I’m focusing on names like JDS Uniphase,
Cisco, and Applied Materials as well as some of the other names in the optical
space. I’m not seeing really heavy-duty selling on our desk. We’re seeing
selective institutional buying.”
John Roque, Vice President, Arnhold and
S. Bleichroeder: “For all the fanfare and promise associated with genomics,
the stocks act like this genomics thing is going to fall into the ‘don’t believe
the hype’ file. On and off for many months we’ve been going with the idea that
these stocks are sales and we believe, after being underwhelmed by the recent
New York Times article, that this is a good time to post an update. All five of
the genomic stocks we monitor are bearish (Celera, Curagen, HGSI, Incyte, and
Millennium), but our work says CRGN, HGSI, and MLNM are the ones most at
risk.”