It is not strange at all. Being a contrarian in the equity markets is a popular strategy. I made some significant money in INTC after Gelsinger was appointed CEO, because I knew a bunch of clueless pundits would say a bunch of supportive things, investors would follow, and there would be a Gelsinger "halo effect" on the stock. I didn't get out at the top, but close enough to it to make me smile.
I also worked at Intel for 12 years, and I was reasonably sure the halo effect was just a mirage. Too many mistakes in too many product lines, and it wasn't too difficult to see the cloud vendors working on their own chips reducing cloud datacenter demand, but several Intel CPU people went to Apple too, so it was a reasonable bet 8-10% of the client market was leaving x86. The 10nm process miss was unforeseeable, but it's public knowledge that Intel that refused to be Apple's foundry over ten years ago. In my mind, that move was the foundation of TSMC's rise to where it is today and the beginning of Intel's decline. IFS had better work out.
Intel under Krzanich was a disaster. I was very bearish on the stock. Now? The current valuations are so low, it's a no-brainer.
Intel's failure to move past 14nm was a big part of the decline too, not only because the process, but because they used an old architecture for too many years, which was also degraded by security mitigations. They had terrible leadership.
But, Intel in decline is far more expansive in what they do than TSMC, and has far more opportunities. They still have the best single-threaded performance in the world (maybe IBM mainframes do, not sure, but I doubt it), they finally are taking being a foundry serious, and they've done far better in GPUs than most expected given where they are in the process. Their I4 is manufacturing ready, and all other nodes on time, or ahead. They finally have a vision where they want to go. And they have so many advantages over companies like AMD, or TSMC, which can't cover the breadth of opportunities Intel has. At current valuations, the opportunities are so pronounced, it's difficult not to like the stock. And given their solid, if uneven, execution lately, they are doing far better than a few years ago.
Intel still commands over 80% of the desktop and mobile market, and that has been remaining stable or growing overall. Servers were a HUGE failure for Intel, and other companies were able to creep in. Ice Lake was horrid, and it replaced a horrid product. Sapphire Rapids is just bleh, Emerald Rapids a little better, but both will either slow or stop market share loss because they are not nearly as bad vis-a-vis competition, as their products were. Granite Rapids moving to I3 was a solid statement on how confident Intel is on that process working well. But, I also think Sierra Forest is a sleeper, and is going to be a really good competitor to ARM, and could be a significant entry for Intel into the server market.
Nothing is ever certain, but the gloom and doom to me is weak thinking, based on panic. The company has a huge market share in mobile and desktops, which is a growing market, overall. Servers have been bad for good reasons, but those reasons are less salient now. IFS has a lot of companies interested, and already is showing growth, despite not even having a proper leading edge node until I3. GPUs are doing better than expected. Nodes are on time or ahead. Yeah, it's a tough macro-economic market, and there is a glut of inventory, but those are transient problems. Their strengths, to me, are far more compelling. I guess we'll revisit this some time down the road, but this is easy money to me. But, I got in around 29 or so, overall (I got some at 35, some at 25, etc...), so I really haven't made any money on it yet. But, I'm really confident I will.
