PREPARING TO BE HURT

IF YOU THOUGHT this week was tough, it may get worse.

Investors who haven't yet made it to the sidelines are likely to get blindsided again next week by more market-hobbling earnings warnings. We'd like to offset that with good news, but there isn't any on the horizon beyond rumors of another rate cut (more on that later).

About the only scheduled corporate event of note is Daimler-Chrysler's Monday morning press conference announcing more exec-shuffling and layoffs in an effort to arrest its skid. That's it: no notable earnings reports save Lowe's (LOW) Monday. No anticipated business updates except for Altera's (ALTR) Tuesday. No analyst meetings besides Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Monday, Gateway (GTW) and Qualcomm (QCOM) Wednesday and Sybase (SYBS) Friday. Gateway's and Qualcomm's promise to be no fun at all.

Most likely to fill this vacuum are more preannouncements of sagging profits and outright red ink. Those who reckoned that the December and January reports had already laid out the worst-case scenario for 2001 reckoned wrong: Motorola's (MOT) warning Friday came six weeks after its earnings report; Sun Microsystems' (SUNW) preannouncement the same day followed the company's analyst meeting by just 17 days. Nortel Networks (NT) now faces shareholder suits for drastically lowering earnings estimates four weeks after its last report (and just two days after making off with a key JDS Uniphase (JDSU) manufacturing plant in a $2.5 billion all-stock deal).

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Too Soon to Buy Technology, Goldman Says; Outlook Cut (Update1)
By Robert Dieterich


New York, Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- With slower spending cutting into U.S. technology companies' profits, investors shouldn't jump in to buy the stocks yet, according to Rick Sherlund and other analysts at Goldman, Sachs & Co.

The firm cut its sales and profit forecasts on computer- hardware companies including EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp. Sherlund and his colleagues also lowered revenue or profit estimates at 12 software companies including Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc.

``Tech stocks may be closer to a bottom than not but are probably still too early to be bought heavily,'' Sherlund and colleague Laura Conigliaro, who follows equipment companies, wrote in a report to clients.

The firm's comments add to the pessimism surrounding technology shares, which have led the Nasdaq Composite Index's 54 percent decline from its March 10 peak.

Goldman analysts also cut revenue and profit forecasts for communications-semiconductor companies such as Applied Micro Circuits Corp. and computer-consulting companies including Keane Inc.

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