What goes up will come down. Thinking about how much they've come up, these things are bound to see some profit-taking from time to time. It's not surprising that some of these stocks are pulling back a little bit.
Tech stocks were oversold on a short-term basis and on Monday everybody had to get out of them because of Microsoft, and then Tuesday everybody thought that if Microsoft is broken up maybe it's not the end of the world, and maybe there's an upside to it.
Nortel is benefiting from a general recovery in the technology stocks in the U.S. as well.
It was a story of two different markets. The U.S. market was flat to nothing, the Canadian market was flying, and it's our darling stocks again -- Northern Telecom and BCE. Canadian technology was really what drove the market here. The story continues for Bell and Nortel.
On a very, very short-term basis, Nortel's stock was exceptionally oversold. Plus there was an article in Barron's that called for tech bounces and talked of a number of stocks that were good value. Nortel was in that handful,
The market took off from where it finished last week which is dumping tech stocks because of concern about poor prospects for quarterly earnings. You had widespread selling focusing on the technology area (and) where we are right now is at, or very close to, a bottom.