Arnie Berman Quotations

LBO candidates have several characteristics in common: healthy businesses, stock prices that reflect little respect, stable cash flows, and potential catalysts to still higher cash flows (cost cutting, asset sales, etc.),

Software companies have a nasty habit of doing so much of their business in the last moments of the quarter that they typically only confess once the quarter has come to a close.

One week does not a capital markets make.

Neither bride nor groom is particularly young, attractive or reeking of potential.

People were encouraged that the Fed may not have to raise rates August 22.

nearly as dire as technology stock prices currently reflect.

If this lasts, the IPO window will open widely enough that more software companies, not just optical technology, will again be participating.

IBM was one of many companies that were good at managing expectations in a period where investors were conditioned to expect earnings surprises.

IBM is one of these big bellwether companies where their business is so solid that in a year like 2001, where everybody was missing, IBM never missed a quarter.

If Oracle, when it came to crunch time in February, had a tough time getting new business, then companies whose crunch time is this week will have a tougher time still.

Here we are seven days into the new quarter, and the pre-announcement season has been extremely mild,

HP's problems with services are not uncommon. IBM has had issues like that, too, of late. The larger problem with tech today (Friday) and in the last month has been that improvement in semiconductor capital equipment, like Applied Materials, doesn't transfer over to the rest of the tech sector. While tech fundamentals are turning, the evidence of that has been slow coming.

I think that is clearly helping Microsoft, ... When I look at this big move, I am really thinking that people are afraid of missing out on something. That is what we are seeing here.

On the surface, you'll see that the financial momentum delivered by the earnings tonight was more positive than not, and stocks should probably get a little boost off this.

Linux promises to fulfill the promise made by Unix a decade ago -- a truly cheap, powerful and entirely open computing architecture. Sun is digging in its heels fighting the trend. As a result, no self-respecting CIO will say she or he wants to do more business with Sun.

When stock prices are rising, companies have conviction about stability in the near-term and are more willing to take on the risk of acquiring something,

The outsize rally in the publicly traded debt for companies in this sector suggests that the bond market is sending a signal that the communications equipment sub-sector is particularly attractive at present relative to other technology sub-sectors,

This recent wave of merger news provides some of the strongest evidence yet that companies are willing to do some long-term planning. The kind of deals getting announced not just bolt-on acquisitions but transformational deals,

At this point, boring makes for an interesting fourth quarter. I think this year's losers win. The stuff that people chucked from their portfolios is what they will want back.

Consolidation activity is actually a signal that service providers are scared and will start spending money again. Equipment companies are long-term beneficiaries of this and frankly, I think that's what the bond market is smelling out,

There's no unilateral belief about tech stocks. People are confused and somewhat justifiably.

Techs are being impacted by the same concerns that the rest of the market is,

Technology stocks were grossly oversold going into this. The recovery in fundamentals won't happen all at once, but it will get under way in the second quarter.

Technology stocks that were once valued on a price-to-possibilities basis are now valued as if history no longer matters,

Companies in the technology sector are clearly overcapitalized and they are going to be increasingly forced by investors to make decisions about their cash,

Any technology spending recovery follows a simple principle: things that are easiest to do without come back last,

You've had a narrow group of tech companies that have been delivering positive and accelerating growth characteristics and money tends to get concentrated in those few companies that are doing that.

A lot of the best news is associated with the PC industry. Intel has been not just a bellwether in the sense that it's big, but in the sense that technology as an industry has returned to positive year-over-year growth rates, and technology as an industry tends to be delivering more upside surprises than downside surprises these days. Intel started to do that earlier and more substantially than the rest of technology.

This marriage of Hewlett and Compaq that's finally been allowed to be consummated reminds me a lot of what would happen if there were a union between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

It looks like we'll have the third period in a row where revisions to estimates are positive. And top-line growth rates, which were negative for a while, will be positive for the third period in a row and will be higher than we saw in either December or March.

The bond market is keenly aware that cash flows have improved and that the chances of investors getting back money they are owed is better. That's not at all irrelevant to stockholders,

The best news this year has been great reactions to bad news,

Sun has not gotten its cost structure under control and is more of a strategic muddle.

So far it looks good. It looks as though IBM is the company that has the right solutions set for some time now.

The Intel numbers were actually in line with the whisper numbers, so the content is not so surprising, but the context is excellent, when you look at what happened in the quarter.

In the late '90s investors believed that tech was such a great secular growth story that cycles didn't matter. In this rebound, the only thing that matters is the economic context.

In the midst of the mania there were a whole lot of companies that went public that were just pure plays on the willingness of businesses to throw money at new projects, ... Now that a lot of these companies have had difficult times, it makes sense that there would be consolidation.

In terms of the kind of hurdle that Microsoft and IBM have to leap over, the kind of growth they have to deliver is not as significant a bar as it is for Intel.

Clearly there are a lot of industries in tech that are just begging to be consolidated. So the question is not whether the pace of M&A picks up in 2005 but whether it will represent a breaking of the dam.

How these companies sound isn't a terribly good basis for investing right now, ... The fact is that in an incremental cyclical recovery, capital spending will recover at a brisker pace than the overall recovery, and technology spending will recover at a faster rate than capital spending.

The key question is whether or not business that's not getting closed is representing postponed business or forgone business, ... The anecdotal evidence is indicating that business is probably postponed.

The first quarter was so brutal for technology spending that even IBM missed the number and chose to lower the bar. But here you have an example of a company that's very big and whose results were not, in any respect, worse than expected.

The first focus for companies is reducing operating costs, squeezing the most out of your employees and restraining headcount.

The latter stage of an economic recovery, where head count is rising and productivity is starting to fall, is the best for technology spending, and that's where we will be in 2006. Business leaders start thinking more about technology and less about questions like capacity expansion or how long the recovery will last.