Thread regarding Intel Corp. layoffs

Go start your own company butthole.

BK is a true hypocrite. He directs the layoff of mostly white males over the age of 50 for cost reduction yet does not fire himself.

Yep & thanks @vlp. :)

-zgt

Yes, I forgot about that @zgt. But technically, when you retire you aren't on a W2 anymore, hence why you are in the 10-15% bracket :)

Congrats on the early retirement!

Not necessarily @bpk. You pay zero capital (long term) gains if you're in the 10-15% tax bracket. Yes, I get that not many can't take advantage of that but it's always been my plan. I ERPed this year (early, I'm not near full retirement age) and planned on selling some INTC stock the year after I retire. Getting close.... :)

It doesn't surprise me he's addicted to Twitter, @jhv. I've always called Tweeters "Tw_ts". LOL

Well, it shouldn't sound like my plan was to sit in cash, @bmc, I said I was planning on researching TODAY what to do with some of my tech stocks. Hence me asking @gmi what areas outside of tech s/he was diversifying into. My research takes a LOT of time. It's nice to have a starting point, even if my research ends up taking me down a different path than I originally started on.

-gdv

(Have you engineers figured out yet that being a W2 salary slave is one of the least tax efficient ways to accumulate wealth? What was your tax rate again?

Mine last year was 15.8% after all the write offs....Don't feel bad.. I was in your shoes for the past 10 years until one of my friends much dumber than me schooled me on this big time....In fact, I have him to thank for what I was once blinded when I simply stuck my head down at my desk flipping bits...)

...and if trump and the GOP is able to eliminate estate taxes (something that Bush Junior and a republican controlled Congress failed to do when they last tried)... well, that would be even more beautiful, because then my kids won't have to pay as much capital gains taxes, depreciation recapture AND not be subject to estate taxes too..... In other words, my kids end up getting a nice free ride....

@bpk Lol.. .We're going off topic here, but you couldn't be more wrong about real estate.

1. I'm in the process of selling my primary home this year.. Just closed escrow. Bought for $800k during 2009 when the markets imploded... Selling now for $1.05m...And of the $205k capital gains (it's slightly less if you factor in costs), I will owe exactly $0 capital gains taxes on it... Why? Simple. When you sell your primary home, the first $250k in capital gains is tax exempt ($500k if you are a joint filer) every two years.. Where on earth are you going to find something else such that you pay no capital gains taxes on? I'm in the process of moving into one of my other homes that has been a rental all this time, that I also bought during the downturn...I'm re-designating this rental as my new primary home....Rinse and repeat on the cap gains treatement...(although things are slightly more complicated these days if you convert a rental back into a primary home... you don't get the full cap gains tax exclusion. It gets prorated based on the percentage of time the home was used as a primary versus a rental, thanks to a stupid law change obama passed around the time of the RE meltdown so taxpayers could pay for some of the mortgage bailout....But there are ways to reduce the taxes on that. It has to do with living there longer so the percentage of the home as owner occupied is much larger than the percentage of time it was used as a rental...And there's other things regarding using 1031 exchanges to other property to defer all the tax consequences associated with depreciation recapture when you sell an investment property...You actually want to defer as much of your depreciation recapture indefinitely, until you die. Because when you do, and your heirs inherit your property, the get what's called a "step up cost basis". Basically the cost of the home for them gets "reset" to the market price at the time you die, so that if they sell the home, they would only pay capital gains on the amount from the new (higher cost basis) than how much it cost you 20-30 years ago..Also, all the depreciation that you've been writing off and carrying over also gets reset to $0 when they inherit the property....That's why if you need money, you never sell your investment property that is doing well... You always take out a loan against it...If you sell, you incur a tax consequence from both capital gains and depreciation recapture. But if you borrow against it, there is no tax consequences, and depending on what you use the money for, the interest from that borrowed money, you can write if off on your taxes... Anyway, I digress

@txl You still need to pay capital gains taxes when you sell, even when you sell a home....So your actual gain isn't as good as you say it is...

Since Donald won, the stock market has shot up around 10%.

Bank stocks like BAC traded around $18 took off and is aroud $23.

Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac was $2/share and now around $4/share because one of Trump's appointee is already considering deregulating them again and letting their dividends and earned income flow back into the company instead of the US treasury as it now stands....

I might not agree with his politics and all the extreme right side. But purely from a financial perspective, we probably live in one of the most exciting, opportunistic times...It's probably on the same level right after the real estate crash when REO and short sales home were selling at 40-50% discount... And we know how that ended up...Everything is above peak prices again, well at least in the better parts of the country (mainly in the west coast, east coast, and Texas... Middle america is still messed up, but it will forever be messed up, no one can fix that...That's just reality)

This administration, from a speculation/investment perspective, is so awesome in so many ways, because they are pretty bad at hiding what is going on. In fact, people wanted transparency in the government, things are pretty transparent to me.. Look at all the billionaires lined up for key government positions? Clearly you guys don't actually believe these billionaires are going to be doing things only for the greater good of the country, and not for themselves and their former corporations/industries do you? I don't know, things seem pretty transparent to me!

That's why I'm so excited about the future. This is like taking candy from a baby since it's so obvious!

And if you want to gamble on a dot com..... Buy Twitter... Come on man, I know the business model stinks and they aren't profitable... But Twitter is the President Elect's main communication medium!!! Do you realize how important that is...

I mean, consider this.. If China really wants to play hardball with Trump, all they need to do buy out Twitter and pay 2x for it...And then shutdown Trump's account and threaten to ban him for life unless he grants China more favorable trade concessions! Whomever controls Twitter, essentially controls the president's voice for the next 4 years! No, I'm serious. The dude is totally addicted to Twitter.

...Also add construction/infrastructure related companies.. Low tech companies that CAT....That's where the spending is going to be from the company....Because that's the sort of jobs that populists can only do......

You guys need to start dumbing down things and start thinking like a populist... Follow the money trail....

@ gdv... ARE YOU BLIND????

Hello? McFly? Trump? Deregulation?.. => Banks Stocks and (non-green) Energy.....

Come on..Wake up man.. Some of you engineers have your head stuck so low flipping bits with your analysis to paralysis, you can't see the obvious...

January 4th selling it all! 10nm ramp needs to be baked into the books this year.

You can play with fire and hope the sinking ship can ride the tide but 10nm ramp will bust the seems and the ship is going to the bottom

I actually want INTC to go $40+ USD. Easier to short... More monies to gain. Cherry picking! :-)

Time Will Tell

Sounds like your plan is to sit in cash.

Why don't you do your own research?

To the OP...

A few thousand shares - let's call it 3000 for arguments sake. A move from $37 to $40 will net you $9,000. This is chump change. If you think that is a lot of money, you are seriously underpaid for being in the technology industry.

What areas outside of Tech are you looking at, @gmi? I decided recently to sell off a lot of my tech stock but haven't had the chance/time to figure out a Plan B for it. I had it on my list to figure out directions to research tomorrow. lol

A few thousand shares and you're fretting over a $3 move from $37 to $40?

Don't even bother with that.

Sell and move on.

Intel is at best dead money.

Look another semi stocks. Almost all of them outperformed Intel - especially NVDA and AMD.

Or better yet - diversify into other names outside of tech.

...stop whining and start winning...

@ays

Sigh....You know the saying, there is no such think as a get rich quick thing? That's mostly true.

If you ask me how to do better financially, I can't tell you it's something you can just do for 1 day, 1 week, or even 1 month, and boom... you score that big fish...

What I can suggest to you, is take your bit-flipping brain and learn about what you "could" be doing financially, if the economic opportunity presents itself.

For example, if you don't now how short sales real estate works, or REO works, I'd learn about that...Not expecting you can do anything with it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year... If you don't know what all the different derivative strategies are out there you could use and under what circumstances you should use them under and what are the risks, you should learn about them too....

The problem is that most of you enginerds (me included) have virtually 0 knowledge how money works, how finance works, what are the different types of investments, pros cons, etc out there. If you are ignorant about something, how can you know how to take advantage of a financial situation when the opportunity presents itself....

The analogy would be like someone telling you to write a sort program for amazon, and didn't bother to learn any of the sorting algorithm up to that point, so you can't even take advantage of the amazon opportunity because you decided to be remain blissfully ignorant in anything but what you were accustomed to learn in your 4 years or so college education.

@nyh So where do I put my money now for a quick gain?

And no, I'm not an intel engineer. Just the same damn software engineer lurker that stumbled across this section, and felt really bad for lot of you that seem so pathetically depressed over a stupid job loss like it's the end of the world and the entire world is crashing down...

Gee, been there done that.... So I totally know what you're going through....And then one day I woke up and realized, Holy fking sht, there's a lot more dumber people out there is that is doing way better than me? Now why is that????

You smart engineers really really need to take some of your brain acumen and figure out how to apply to to financial engineering. Come on guys, this isn't rocket science. There are some pretty stupid people I went to school with that didn't make the cut in engineering but ended up being accountants and money managers..And they know how to play these games way better than you can... Not because your not smart, you just put all your brain into flipping bits, you didn't bother think about using it and stopped learning how to use your brain to flipping dollars.

I know, because I use to be one of them.. And then when you get RIF'd, this is how hopeless you feel. Because flipping bits was all you are accustomed to problem solve...

Grow a pair and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

The question depends on how badly you depend on the money from the sales, and how much taxes you want to pay for the sales, and what you would do with the money...

If you are unsure, there are 2 strategies I've employed that I found useful.

1. the 50% rule: sell 50% now, hold on to 50%, and sell 50% every +-20% gain or loss from that point on.

So for example, if you start out with 10000 shares, sell 5000... Then if the price goes up or down another 20%, sell another 50% (2500 shares)...

This what I call the half glass full/empty approach... If you're a positive guy, it's the half glass full viewpoint... You lock in some gain now.. In case the stock goes down, you aren't losing as much, and if it goes up, you still have 1/2 invested... Or if you're a negative kind of guy, it's the half glass empty viewpoint in which, when it goes down, you should have sold the entire thing and when it goes up, you should have kept it all.... (Don't be the half empty kind of guy, you'll never be happy)... Given the choices, i'd rather have less of a profit by selling part of it early than holding on completely and risking a capital loss. Plus from a tax planning perspective, you don't want to do a huge lump sell all at once, otherwise it could throw you into a much larger tax bracket, if you aren't there already.

1. Selling covered calls.... You can use this approach, if the stock price really doesn't move that much (IE it's a dead stick).....The idea is the following...Sell slightly out of money covered call that expires 2-3 months out... Then there's a high probability that the call option will expire worthless, allowing you to keep the option premium...

For example: right now intel stock is at $36.97/share......

1 contract call option for intel at $37/share that expires Feb 17,2017 costs the buyer $1.23 per share

(1 contract = right to buy 100 shares at $37, and the cost of that contract is $123 for 100 shares)...

So let's say you're not sure if you want to sell 1000 shares of intel stock or not and you don't mind waiting until feb. 2017 to make that decision. Instead of selling the shares now, you could sell 10 contracts of call options of intel at $37/share that expires in Feb 17,2017. You will give some guy/gal the right to buy your 1000 shares of intel stock at $37 up to February 2017..... In return, they pay your upfront $1.23 x $1000 or $1,230 for that option contract. That money goes right into your brokerage account immediately....

Now let's consider what can happen...

1. In scenario 1, Intel stock stays down to anything less than $37/share by Feb 17,2017. Well, guess what, the guy that bought those option contracts just paid you $1230 for a worthless contract. Because that option is useless. If the market price of the stock is less than $37/share, he's not going to "exercise" that contract you gave to him, because he could buy the shares lower than $37/share on the free market....

You still own that 1000 shares, and you get to keep his $1230... And you're better off than if you just held onto the stock, because although the share price did go down, you also earned $1230 from the option contract your wrote, versus if you didn't.

1. In scenario 2, the stock price goes up between $37-$38.23.. In this case, you make a little money, because while the person might chose to exercise his/her options, and you have to sell your stock, you got to kep the $1.23/share he paid you up front.

2. In scenario 3, the stock price shoots up above $38.23....Well, in this case, you end up selling the stock less than what you could have sold it if you just held on even with the option contract. But you also have to consider (a) you were planning to sell right away anyway when the stock price was $37/share, so if you had done that anyway, whatever gain in the stock price afterwards wouldn't have been yours anyway since you already sold... and (b) you can't always time the market and know exactly when to sell at the highest point of the stock price....

In fact, the truth is for a stock that isn't that volatile and doesn't move that much month to month (such as intel) most out-of-money call options usually expire worthless. Keep in mind that option price also steadily declines in price the closer it gets to the expiration date if it remains out of money...

So you could chain and ladder them up month after month, writing covered calls every 2 months, collecting $1-2/share every two month as your covered calls expire worthless most of the time....Keeping $1/share each month for say 7-8 month out of the year: $8/year per share...

That's a pretty nice return for shares that don't move....(You do want to avoid months that could subject the share price to increased volatility...Specifically the month where intel releases their earnings)....

Obviously, you don't want to do this for a stock that has a lot of volatility like Amazon or facebook...And you want to keep an eye out for things that would make your "boring/low volatile companies suddenly volatile"... A good example of such a change of event would be like Chevron/Texaco, which was a boring stock until the price of oil went haywire. Anyway, you're an engineer. You should be able to figure what I'm saying out. But this is a decent strategy for stocks that don't really move that you don't really care if you hold on to or not.

The nice part is that since you aren't an employee anymore, you can totally play this game... Employees are bound to company policies regarding taking positions in derivatives of the company stock. Although taking derivative positions in company stock while being an employee is in itself not in violation of SEC laws for most employees, most companies adopt a COMPANY policy that prohibits current employees from buying/selling derivatives of the company stock, to avoid the entire issue that a big windfall from a derivative position might be perceived as insider trading by the SEC (IE although you were just lucky and didn't actually have any insider information, because you are an employee of the company, guilt by association..) So that's why most companies have policies that tell employees "don't do this why you are an employee".

Anyway my 2 cents...

While I wholeheartedly agree, @kdk, I'm not entirely sure now's the time. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'd love to know what Biz-man Trump told him and others around the table... (Note I didn't say President. Not a slam but he's more a businessman than Pres.)

So, with that said... it feels like there might be more room to run. At least I'm hoping (without knowing a darn thing.)

You mean you have a few thousand shares of Intel stock? I would sell them before earnings are released in January. Intel share price has been carried along with the market rise since the election, but there's nothing other than the dividend yield holding it there. You might want to wait to the new year for tax reasons, but Intel is due for a major correction once the market sees through all the PR BS.