AMD's Shares Have Lost Almost 25% in Two Days

Darling Advanced Micro Devices marketplace appears to be a darling no more. The company, which makes microchips to power PCs and servers, saw its share price shrivel by almost 25% in trading just on Wednesday through midday on Thursday.

It's been a wild ride this year for investors in AMD, which-regardless of the market gyrations-has been benefitting from a long-term chip redesign effort under CEO Lisa Su. AMD shares ended 2017 at $ 10.28, rose above $ 34 last month, and has since sold off to $ 19.40 midday on Thursday. At the height, AMD's shares had more than tripled. Now they have fallen a total of 43% from that recent high, hit back on Sept. 13.

The immediate catalyst for the sell-off this week was the company's third quarter earnings report on Wednesday, along with the general market's weakness among tech stocks. AMD's revenue was up 4% to $ 1.65 billion for the quarter, but the company's forecast was $ 1.45 billion, which would account for an 8% gain, was a deeper miss against Wall Street expectations.

Still, the real story of AMD's highs and lows is a complex of chips for PCs, servers and graphics, the ups and downs of the cryptocurrency market, and the stumbles of primary competitor Intel.

To start, Su oversaw a wholesale redesign of AMD's chip lineup to focus on higher performance and new generation of products. , and Vega graphic chip drove AMD's $ 9 billion, up 29% from the same period of last year. That's also a net income of $ 299 million versus a loss of $ 14 million in 2017.

But some of the sales have been boosted by the lack of a boom in cryptocurrencies.

People who wanted to crunch the calculations, which are often used on chips by AMD and Nvidia (nvda). As cryptocurrency prices peaked, demand for graphics cards shot up.

AMD's third quarter results. AMD said it was almost 10% of sales last year, or about $ 150 million, versus almost nothing in this year's quarter. That's not so bad, Wall Street, and maybe some AMD executives, expected.

The final issue driving AMD's Intel, which has lost its CEO, and has struggled to move its manufacturing process to cutting-edge techniques for several years.

Intel admitted at the end of July that its much delayed 10-nanometer chip line, first expected to arrive back in 2015, would not be available in high volumes until the end of next year. AMD 's shares closed at $ 18.94 the day before Intel' s time lapse Intel 's deadline for a mbadive sales increase.

Lately, Intel (intc) has been offering more and more information and releasing chips than, at least on paper, they are appearing to be strong competitors for AMD's (amd) products, with or without the 10-nanometer process. A part of the disappointment with AMD's third and (projected) fourth quarter revenue stemming from a failure of the company to cash in quite a bit of Intel's troubles.

As longtime badyst chip industry Stacy Rasgon at Bernstein Research summed up in a report on Thursday: "It is clear that expectations are significantly over the last few months, and now must come back to earth, with the question of ultimate earnings power ( and what one wants to pay for it).