They Just Don't Get RIM!

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- One Wall Street analyst -- Morgan Stanley(MS) -- stated the obvious: that RIM(RIMM) is coming unstitched. The smartphone maker is getting creamed by Apple(AAPL) in addition to its own incompetency and missteps. That is the prevailing assumption and, as regular readers know, it's long been thought true in these quarters.

Here's the deal, though: another Wall Street firm made a slightly counterintuitive call.

Goldman Sachs(GS) , while not wholly positive by any measure, expects BlackBerry shipments of 9.9 million. That is far better than consensus, which runs at well under 9 million. Additionally, Goldman Sachs pegs a higher value to RIM's intellectual property value, always a dicey item to value, a bit akin to catching a moonbeam in a jar, setting it at $3 billion. That's twice where Morgan Stanley sees it and has considerable implications for possible breakup value.

The point is: Barron's does a good job of chronicling these two reports. The more positive is worth weighing out, if only to dismiss it as foolhardy or the product of wishful thought.

Nearly all other media outlets, though, merely go with the negative report, which reflects conventional wisdom, takes no risks and contains some flashy phrases like "triple whammy" and "essentially broken." Everything the media loves.

All Things D, for example, ran the headline "Let's Face It, RIM Is a Total Disaster" and illustrated the article with a photograph of a train wreck." It was based entirely on the Morgan Stanley report. Nary a mention of Goldman's more positive take.

In the end, I side with the more negative Morgan Stanley assessment. But it never hurts to test and re-test your assumptions with a dissenting opinion.

When the media does not bother presenting that dissenting opinion, they do traders a disservice.