RealMoney Silver - Semis' Downgrade Ignores Killer Fourth Quarter

Semis' Downgrade Ignores Killer Fourth Quarter
By Jim Cramer
RealMoney.com Columnist
1/2/2008 7:41 AM EST

You are supposed to be able to own tech right up until the last week of this month. At least that's when the big institutions like to hold on until, with the last holdouts keeping the big techs on the sheets until the Goldman Sachs (GS) tech conference in February.

But the big downgrade of the semis such as National Semi (NSM) , Texas Instruments (TXN) and AMD (AMD) -- insult to injury there for all of you year-end tax-loss buyers -- by Bank of America smacks of gun-jumping: legal gun-jumping to get out of a group before a consumer-led slowdown.

That's what I always think of these days when I think of stocks like these, particularly TXN and NSM, which have direct exposure to the consumer through all of the gadgets that the Best Buys (BBY) of the world sell. (Remember the latter rallied at the end of the year because of a crushing of Circuit City (CC) , not an acceleration of the consumer spend on electric gadgets.)

I think the call fails to take into account the prospects that these companies had great fourth quarters and will look historically if not hysterically cheap when they report -- except for AMD, which is Circuit City to Intel's (INTC) BBY.

Remember -- and maybe the BAC analyst is forgetting -- National Semi's most recent call was about how the sky wasn't falling despite valuations falling (and TXN had a darned good one, too).

My conclusion: If you want to take a profit, go ahead. To me, there aren't enough profits to take!

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs.

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