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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> I'm skeptical that Intel really has that much of a problem, and the investors in the stock market seem to agree.

It's way, way, way too soon to judge the long-term implications of Meltdown and Spectre on Intel. If their clients want to switch, it'll take months and years to do that. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but it means we won't really know the full extent for a while.

The stock price is a really crude metric. For judging the long-term implications of this, we can't look at how the stock has performed in the last two weeks alone and extract any meaningful information.

My prediction: nobody big is going to switch away from Intel entirely, but they will start to prioritize investments in technology built on its competitors, as a way to hedge their future risk. That's definitely bad for Intel, because over time, it'll reduce their lock-in.

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Intel stock is down ~10% and AMD up ~10% since end of December. I'm not even sure why people are saying the stock market thinks it's not a problem. The stock market represents a weighted average of possible futures and it has priced in some damage. Is the idea that Intel should instantly drop 90%?

As I write this Intel stock is around $44, up from $41 last October, and that $41 is at an almost 18-year high, it hasn't been this high since the Dot-com bubble. Look at the longer term graph[1]. Similar story for AMD[2] except it's at an all time high since 2007-ish.

The reason people are saying Intel stock isn't down is because of that, when what HN considers the worst thing ever is indistinguishable from fluctuations for the last 3 months the market doesn't think it's a big deal.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+stock

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+stock

This didn’t become public last October.

Well yes, that's the point.

The point is that it's up from an arbitrary historical value? It's down since the story broke - that's the point.

It's down from 47 to 45, and it's almost impossible to attribute this to these bugs with any reliability. Yes, there was some initial panic in the first days after the bug. You can see this in the volume the day after it was announced. But things have largely recovered since the low midway through this month.

Of course, the stock market by no means knows everything. But the aggregate prediction of traders is that this doesn't matter very much to the bottom line, and I tend to agree.

To be fair AMD stock has a a fairly volatile history. I have traded it over the last fifteen years and my only thought is: Wall Street has a vendetta against AMD.

For example a while back amd announced in an earnings call: we are in the black and reduced out debt subtantially. The stock tanks by 15-20 percent

They just means they were expecting a bigger profit.

The analogy I would use is that investors may know something is going to happen, but there is a lag before it really happens (less market share), and the stock price decline lags that. In school they teach you that a stock tracks the future predictions but it doesn't quite work like that. For big, widely held things, the stock often lags at predicting future troubles until the last group of investors realize that the trouble exists. That also explains why when stocks fall they often fall quickly rather than gradually.

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