LT Cap,

Having a dog in the fight, I am of course glad to see INTC spending serious $ on the future. Although PC sales have been in decline for years (I also would expect that, at some point, this stabilizes to some degree), it's still a main bread and butter area. So it worries me that AMD's Ryzen line does appear competitive and more, as it threatens to gain significant market share. Intel apparently feels the heat, given that on Oct. 5th it will release its 'Coffee Lake' chips, and the short intervals between Skylake/Kabylake/Coffeelake are like no other crowded release schedule I can remember, and I think part of that is to stay ahead of AMD as best they can. I can feel the rush of products personally, as I bought the parts for a Xeon 5930x gaming system around May of 2016 (still  haven't put it together), and it's appearing quite dated, significantly down the 'hierarchy charts' of INTC's chips. I am, admittedly, getting a little nervous about my significant stake in INTC - it's hard for me to imagine that competition on all sides will not affect bottom line results. Hope I'm wrong on that - INTC is still paying almost 3% on the dividend, and their price has remained relatively stable within a range in the mid-$30's for some time. But I'm less certain than ever that they can maintain that.

On another topic, but which I think may be of interest - Yellen is admitting that she's essentially clueless as to why inflation is behaving so weakly, and yet is groping towards rate hikes while being in the dark about explanatory data. The NY Times story appears here -  nytimes.com/20...p-news

and a more focused version of her lack of insight is here:  nytimes.com/20...rticle

Personally, I'm glad to have the rate hikes, as savings/MM and CD rates are starting to lift off the dead bottom, and one can earn at least more than a pittance by parking money in them, waiting for a better use for it. (BTW, I *think* I've mentioned this before, but there's a site that is just tremendous for rate hunters, featuring everything from the best rates from institutions on different financial products, reviews of the institutions, and even down to granular data, such as a calculator that tells you if you invest in a long-term CD to get a higher rate, what actual rate the Early Withdrawal Penalty (EWP) will result in if you break the CD. It has lead to some interesting places - there was (now dead) a 30 month CD yielding 1.85%, but with no early withdrawal penalty - liquid money, essentially. The best no early withdrawal penalty CDs are now in the 1.5-1.6% range. The rise in interest rates does nothing but encourage those rates, of course.)

depositaccounts.com/