Micron Braced For Losses (MU)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

Micron Technology Inc. (NYSE:MU) is set to report earnings after the close today.  First Call has consensus at -$0.22 EPS and $1.4 Billion in revenues.  Next quarter is expected to show a loss of -$0.04 EPS on roughly $1.6 Billion in revenues.

Micron Tech. has been a real technology laggard in a market where so many stocks have performed quite well, particularly if you review the list of last week’s Window Dressing stocks that are up so much.  Shares are at $11.40, barely above the lows of the $10.30 to $18.18 range seen over the last 52-weeks.

Most of the actual recent analyst calls have become more positive and the average buy target appears to be close to $16.00.  Its chart has not been overly revealing and the recent $1.00 gain over the last couple weeks has removed any major oversold read.  Options traders seem to actually be braced for a move of up to $0.74 to $0.88 in either direction, which is insulation for a 6% stock move.  These options might be worth looking at because there are over 55,000 contracts in the open interest in the closest OCT Call Strikes ($11 and $12) and over 39,000 contracts in the open interest of the closest Put contracts.

The company has already cut 5% of its workforce, or has announced the cuts, and has said it is still expanding its IM Flash venture with Intel.  The company also noted lower DRAM prices affecting the quarter and higher production, but the US-DRAM leader did not offer up formal guidance.

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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