You shouldn’t feel bad reaching for more chips, two market watchers told CNBC.
Chipmakers, that is.
While the group struggled last week after softer-than-expected earnings reports from Xilinx and Intel — with Intel’s lowered 2019 forecast pushing the sector more than 1% lower on Friday — the two analysts don’t think the moves spell doom for the sector.
“There is some value down here on a pullback” in Intel, Bill Baruch, founder and president of Blue Line Futures, told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “Looking in the $50 area, you can find some retracement levels.”
But for those not willing to risk buying Intel after its slide, Baruch suggested avoiding “the idiosyncratic risk” and instead buying into the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF, known on the Street as SOXX, which was above $210 before Monday’s opening bell.
“There’s a breakout there out above $200, and it’s going to stay above there,” Baruch said of the fund, which counts Qualcomm and Nvidia among its top holdings. “It can even pull back as far as $185 and stay in a strong uptrend. I think this overall sector recovers. I think we’ll find it higher over the next 30 days.”
Chantico Global CEO Gina Sanchez agreed that a recovery is in store now that some of the smoke in the sector has cleared.
“China was a big cloud, and Qualcomm’s kissing and making up with Apple actually turned out to be Intel’s loss, so some of this is very idiosyncratic, ” she said in the same “Trading Nation” interview. “It’s a really mixed bag, but there’s an expectation that these semis will recover in the second half or, if you listen to Texas Instruments, the first half of next year. ”
“The point is that this recovery, or this soft patch, is likely to find some footing later in the year, and so I think you don’t give up the semis altogether,” Sanchez said. “But you do have to be careful about which stocks you’re in.”
The VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF, which tracks the sector, shed nearly 2% last week, but is up almost 33% year to date.