Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

Jim Cramer fills his blog on RealMoney every day with his up-to-the-minute reactions to what's happening in the market and his legendary ahead-of-the-crowd ideas. This week he blogged on:

• a tech disconnect,
• reconciling contradictions, and
• the folly of waiting for certainty.

Click here for information on RealMoney, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.

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Making Sense of a Tech Disconnect
Posted at 3:05 p.m. EDT, July 27, 2009

Something makes no sense to me. That something is the reaction from Dell (DELL Quote) and Microsoft (MSFT Quote) vis-a-vis Western Digital (WDC Quote) and Intel (INTC Quote). The latter two, often considered the hardware guts of personal computers, are on fire. Western Digital, a disc drive company, just hit a 52-week high. Amazing. Just a huge run. Intel's become an "up" stock, one that gets bought on every couple penny dip.

Dell? Nothing. Dell's telling us the market's weak. Dell's saying that people aren't yet ready to buy personal computers. Microsoft was so downbeat about personal computer sales that you would have thought that Intel and Western Digital should have preannounced to the downside!

What's going on?

I think that Dell's losing share, and losing share fast. It's lost its way. I don't know why; I have to blame management.

Microsoft's got a product transition, but the quarter should have been better. One of the conclusions I would like to reach from this is that Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote) should be doing well: Those chips and discs are going somewhere.

Of course, all of the good Nasdaq news was bookended by the ugly start with Dell and what looks like the ugly end with Microsoft.

I think those two are the outliers. I feel that Apple (APPL Quote), too, although only 3% of the personal computer market, is showing incredible demand.

Seeing this kind of growth at the hardware companies makes you question the management of the companies that should be growing right along with Western Digital and Intel.

I think tech will be on a big run here again, after we digest. I think that Dell and Microsoft can be dragged with it, especially the latter; as I said, Microsoft has a new product ahead of it.

But the "weak PC" argument, after looking at Western Digital and Intel, just doesn't hold water.

Random musings: UBS now says no trading in the dreaded inverse and levered ETFs. Terrific!

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Hewlett-Packard.