That's a Wall St. view that completely misses the point. You could look at it very differently. The new CEO is making some bold moves to undo a bunch of bad decisions his predecessors made.
Buying Palm was nonsense. HP was never the company to make it work. Contrary to that, Autonomy, one of the best software companies in the world, is a good fit for HP's enterprise strategy.
Spinning off the PC business is very likely a step towards selling it altogether, similar to what IBM did years ago.
I think these are all steps in the right direction and I'm thinking of buying the stock once the current stock market panic has settled down a bit.
The best time to buy is when a panic subsides. It's better to miss the first 10% of a recovery than to lose 20% catching falling knives. That's what I have learned painfully in 2008. (I just wish hadn't forgotten it by 2011 :)
I don't, but at that point the fundamentals matter again. The decline isn't self feeding any longer.
Most investors set stop loss levels for themselves. So when a stock crashes through those levels it triggers a lot of sell orders which makes the stock go down more triggering more stop losses, etc. Once the cascade has stopped, the game changes a little bit and fundamentals are reconsidered.
[Edit] And I didn't mean a 10% bounce immediately after the fall, but rather a gradual move up over the course of a few weeks.
Buying Palm was nonsense. HP was never the company to make it work. Contrary to that, Autonomy, one of the best software companies in the world, is a good fit for HP's enterprise strategy.
Spinning off the PC business is very likely a step towards selling it altogether, similar to what IBM did years ago.
I think these are all steps in the right direction and I'm thinking of buying the stock once the current stock market panic has settled down a bit.