JNPR Juniper Networks Inc.

I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in JNPR. I doubt that even a single reader of this blog would own it, or understand what it does, I certainly do not. But there is one thing that always seems to catch the interest and fascination of Canadian investors in particular, the word “network”. We got so infatuated with our own Nortel that at one point it constituted more than 30% of the capitalization of the TSE. So, for the fun of it, I put JNPR in my blog for the first time slightly more than two months ago (July 27), here are the then and now charts.

jnpr jnpr oct 2011

At the time the stock was already trading at about $32, from there it dropped to $16.67 losing about half it’s value over and above what it had already lost. The whole range of the drop was from $45.01 to $16.67 for a loss of 62.96%,very close to the ubiquitous Fibonacci 61.8 Needless to say, there was not a single analyst that predicted this outcome , even remotely. The problem with these guys is that they spend all day looking at minute fundamentals which for the most part they do not understand, and then conclude what the market should do. EW, and for that matter, most technical analysis which, by the way EW is definitely not, does the opposite. It “listens” to the market to hear what it says and then makes an educated guess as to where it might go. The results are invariable better.

Concerning JNPR, of course it is a buy at the $17 level, if only for a trade. The problem is that I have about 300 different stocks that come up from time to time and I do not have a computerized system that flags these events, so in that sense you are on your own.