Two of my favorite high-beta companies I have been tracking for some time are Sandisk and VMWare. Both belong to different sub-sectors of tech (Sandisk makes flash memory for cameras and peripherals, VMWare makes software), but both had the luxury of suffering a near-collapse in stock price.
The charts have not really been helpful in predicting today's massive sell-off. With Sandisk, the only red-flag was that every rally was met with a sell-off:
The same can be said for VMWare. As I stated in a previous entry, VMWare is going to face significant competition from Microsoft. Microsoft's latest operating system (which is slated for release November 2008) will include comparable virtualization software at a much lower price.
What's next for these guys? Well, I might guess a support price of $22-25 for VMW. SNDK has already violated its lower support channel. So in short, the bottom for both stocks is unknown.
