Filed under: Analyst reports, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple Inc (AAPL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), International Business Machines (IBM), Technology

I think IBM (NYSE: IBM), whose colleagues include Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), is a great long-term idea. Unfortunately, it might be a bad short-term idea. According to news from earlier in the week, some analysts are speculating that Big Blue may miss earnings expectations for the third quarter.

The negative catalyst? You guessed it. The terrible economic calamity that is tearing down Wall Street institutions is threatening the iconic technology concern. Not even the Cloverfield monster could do as much damage to Wall Street as what has been done by those mutant-mortgage investment vehicles. Not even close. And the theory now is that IBM may become the victim of its exposure to both customers in the financial sector and to the financing it extends.

However, if you read a rebuttal by my colleague Douglas A, McIntyre, you’ll see that he doesn’t buy that IBM is going to miss come the next report. He brings up some good points. In fact, he brings up probably the best point there is: IBM hasn’t warned yet, and if it needed to, it would have. So the stock sold off during the week in part because of all this debate about Q3. It begs the question: Does this sell-off make IBM a buy?

Continue reading IBM: A great company, but now may not be the time to buy

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.