Death is guaranteed. Steady gainer as a short, from continual writedowns of goodwill on the balance sheet. http://www.businessinsider.com/shaw...silicon_alley_insider+(Silicon+Alley+Insider)
Seth Klarman is actually going against your opinion. Check this out: http://articles.marketwatch.com/201..._h-p-shares-value-investors-steven-milunovich
The BI story is a pretty simplistic way of looking at things. They had huge goodwill on the balance sheet since forever. How's that new ? Who cares if they write it down ? Doesn't change the fact that FCF has been positive for the last 10 years. Also in the past 10 years they bought back 1/3 of their own stock - hence the extra LT debt which they're paying off at low interest rates. Their bonds yielding 2.xx % do not imply a bankruptcy - bond guys smarter than stock guys. I'm a value guy and I wouldn't pick a long or short side here, but if I was inclined I'd pick the May 13 or Jan 14 call or put spread. The VIX is low - options are cheap. The longer options give you time to be correct regardless. A blind monkey could have run Ebay, but I think Whitman is a pretty smart cookie ... she's got a long-term plan for HPQ, and she's likely going to have time to see that plan follow through - they can't exactly fire her and get a higher profile CEO.
That Wu guy sounds pretty stupid - he says HPQ is worth -2 but puts them at "Neutral" lol. Also it said that was a downgrade, so apparently until very recently he had them as a buy, meaning he probably recommended them all the way from $40+ down to the $16 range. Way to go Wu! I don't quite understand if Epson can make good money selling printers, IBM and others make big, big money selling computer services, and Samsung does great selling gadgets like Tablets how come HPQ is having such a rough time. I think Whitman is still a question at best. Obviously ebay was a no-brainer thing to run, but can she run a turnaround? What is the plan? JJacksET4