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David Callaway
Jan. 7, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EST · Recommend · Post:
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As my BlackBerry fades, a holiday wish for media
First Take "º
Some on FOMC think more will be needed
By David Callaway, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- It's the first week after the holidays, and folks are sporting their new gadgets on the streets like the shiny silver six-shooters of Western days of old. Can tech stocks keep up with the hype?
Even as fresh Droids, BlackBerrys, and iPhones are pried from holiday gift boxes and activated on the fly, dangling power cords and earpieces, a wall of buzz about coming iSlate tablets, 3-D television and biodegradable laptops is hitting this tech-torn land.
Forget Iran, impending European currency crises, U.S.-bound terrorism, or unemployment. The annual, self-indulgent, gadget frenzy is in full bloom, held back only by the dire fear that AT& T Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!t/quotes/nls/t (T 27.61, -0.41, -1.46%) and the wireless spectrum carriers won't be able to keep up with soaring bandwidth demand.
Google's Nexus One is the first Android phone that may make Apple nervous because it does a few things better than the iPhone, Walt Mossberg says. Additionally, the phone will be sold untethered to specific carriers.
As I walk down the streets of San Francisco's financial district, everybody's got their gadgets out -- even more than usual. So much so, that nobody seems to notice my new, black leather BlackBerry holster, which finally catapults me into the world of the corporate gunslinger. Although unlike, say, John Wayne, who would pull his six-shooter from his holster, lean back and dust off a half dozen rounds into the nearest bad guy, my form is more of a draw, hunch and thumb rumble.
Draw, hunch, thumb rumble. Quick draw, hunch shoulders, lift device to face, bang thumbs aggressively. Not very cool in a turn-and-shoot gadget battle. Or very John Wayne-like. Who is John Wayne, you ask as you scan for a gun app on your iPhone? He was a big motion picture st..., ah, never mind. Look him up on YouTube.
Over at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the gadgets of the day are the new seashell laptops from ASUS International of Taiwan, with backlit keyboards so gamers can play in the dark after their parents go to bed. Or another new laptop that incorporates bamboo in the exterior to reduce tech waste and give a nod to the environmental movement. See reporter's notebook from CES in Vegas. Soon we'll be eating and smoking these things when we're done with them.
But what does this all mean for tech stocks? Is it the signal for a new round up in the tech bull market? Or the last gasp from a big rally last year, not unlike the end of the Internet bubble in the spring of 2000?
The Nasdaq Composite Index /quotes/comstock/10y!i:comp (COMP 2,301, -7.62, -0.33%) has been flat the past two trading days, conspicuously ignoring the hype by Apple Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 210.97, -3.41, -1.59%) , Google Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!goog/quotes/nls/goog (GOOG 608.26, -15.73, -2.52%) , Microsoft Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!msft/quotes/nls/msft (MSFT 30.77, -0.19, -0.61%) and the like after a nice rally on Monday in the first day of the year's trading.
The index rallied almost 44% last year as tech stocks competed with emerging markets and commodities for investor excitement, handily beating a 23.5% gain for the broader S&P 500 Index /quotes/comstock/21z!i1:in\x (SPX 1,137, +0.62, +0.05%) and more than doubling the Dow Jones Industrial Average /quotes/comstock/10w!i:dji/delayed (INDU 10,574, +1.66, +0.02%) performance of 18.8%. Seagate Technology was the best Nasdaq stock of the year in 2009, up more than 300%. See Trading Strategies package for best and worst 2009 performers and forecasts for 2010. And Google finished over $600 a share for the first time in a couple years.
But the Nasdaq, which closed Wednesday at 2,301, hasn't done much since it hit the low 2000 levels nine years ago in the year 2001, after crashing down from a peak above 5,000. Indeed, I remember arguing at the time on Tech TV -- a now-defunct San Francisco-based channel dedicated to all things tech at the end of the last decade -- that the Nasdaq would never fall below 3,000 again.
And yet, a decade later, even after Google, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Apple (for a second time) changed the world, we are nowhere in sight of that midway milestone back to the Nasdaq all-time high.
The consumer tech favorites, despite some of their own individual stock booms, could never carry the entire industry in terms of shareholder value. And they won't this time, even with the potential IPOs of some of the bigger names in the next few years. The revolution in consumer technology continues to gain speed, but as long as people need jobs to pay for their new gadgets, tech stocks will have a hard time keeping up.
David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.
- faustoii | 1:15 a.m. Today1:15 a.m. Jan. 7, 2010
Fed may need to buy more mortgage-backed securities to help prop up economy.
2:47 p.m. Jan. 6, 2010 | Comments: 28
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