Wall Street has a tendency to go to sleep between reporting periods and shares move on fleeting bits of news rather than fundamentals, and IBM Corp’s shares have been relatively bouncy over the past few weeks – but now the third quarter reporting period looms, and those whose attention had been diverted elsewhere have now woken up to what everyone in the wider world had already assumed – that IBM’s third quarter figures would be lousy, with early Summit shipments not able to fill the holes left by a string of local weakenesses in most of its major markets – AS/400s doing spectacularly badly in the UK, Germany, France and Japan all soggy and if anything getting worse, personal computers doing badly, and probably making a loss, everywhere – and so IBM shares are back under pressure as analysts cut the too-rosy forecasts they made for the quarter to give their salesmen a bullish story to tell on the stock; people are now talking of IBM doing as little as 20 cents to 30 cents a share for the quarter, compared with the $1.95 this time last year.
