Great Call on Activision Blizzard! What's Next?

Thanks to the company's focus on non-GAAP financials -- which adjusted for deferred revenue, intangible writedowns, and the like -- the results at Activision Blizzard (Nasdaq: ATVI) can be a bit tough to follow.

However, there were a few things that were very unmistakable about the company's fourth-quarter earnings announcement. One was that management gave guidance for 2010 that was better than analysts had anticipated. The company also announced a new $1 billion share repurchase program. And, maybe my favorite, the company introduced a $0.15 annual dividend.

Taken together, those three items above show a high level of confidence in the future on the part of Activision Blizzard's future. So is it time to hop on board?

On the Motley Fool CAPS community Activision Blizzard's stock currently carries four stars out of a possible five, thanks to nearly 5,600 outperform ratings.

Quite a number of CAPS members have scored big by betting on Activision Blizzard's stock, but few have done as well with it as TMFBreakerJava. This savvy stock picker has nabbed more than 100 points of market outperformance by giving the stock a thumbs up back in mid-2006 and hanging on ever since.

TMFBreakerJava is one of CAPS' All-Stars -- players with a rating of 80 or greater -- and has managed a stock picking accuracy of 64% while racking up more than 2,300 points. Activision Blizzard isn't this player's only great call. Here's a look at a few of the other prescient picks:

Data from CAPS. *Points are measured by how many percentage points a call has outperformed the S&P 500 index.

So what has this investor been looking at more recently? Here are a few of the most recent calls on CAPS:

Data from CAPS.

While not all of these picks may pan out, they could be a good place to start further research. I decided to take a closer look at Seagate and Western Digital.

The dustbin of history?
TMFBreakerJava doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to the reasoning behind the underperform rating on Seagate and WDC:

The hard drive has been an essential component of the PC revolution and ever larger untis have enabled the growth of computing. However the hard drive is going obsolete as Flash Memory, growing in capacity and falling in price at the speed of Moore's law is disrupting their business with a superior product. [Western Digital] has in recent yearrs formed a duoploy with Seagate in the hard drive space. They are in better shape that Seagate, but they are still doomed. Western Digital has had a great run, but their key product is headed for the dustbin of history. Expect them to underperform.

The idea that hard disk drives and buggy whips may soon be having a beer together in the Old Useless Things cantina may not be all that farfetched. Today, hard disk drives still have certain advantages, particularly when it comes to the amount of storage they can offer and the price-per-megabyte of storage.

However, there's a reason why flash memory has taken over so quickly in the areas where it is cost competitive. Because flash is microchip rather than a disk with moving parts, data access is much quicker with flash. Flash is also much smaller and lighter than traditional disk drives, making it very appealing for manufacturers that are continually trying to make their products more compact and easier to transport.

But let's not start digging those graves too soon. It will still take time for flash to be truly cost competitive with disk drives across the whole range of storage needs. In the meantime, both Seagate and Western Digital are expected to produce some pretty healthy profits. And with both stocks trading at insanely low 2010 price-to-earnings ratios of around six, it's no wonder that each has more than 900 outperform votes on CAPS.

So here's the important question: What's your take? Are Seagate and Western Digital really headed for extinction? Or do they still have some more good days ahead? Get in the action by clicking over to CAPS. It's absolutely free and already has more than 150,000 stock pickers chipping in to find the best stocks out there.

Does this annoying, but oh-so-important, advice apply to hard disk drive makers?