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Tech stocks future looks bad - Barron's Barron's highlights high-tech strategist Fred Hickey's picks. Fred's is bearish as ever on the techs. He has been right as rain on the group, and, most particularly, on the awesome inventory buildup that has been in train for many months now and was too quickly seized upon as evidence of a gathering boom in tech. Inventories are still huge, he reports, and, in many cases, still building. As Fred points out, "There's so much unused capacity in the communications world that even the next big new thing in technology, VoIP won't make a dent in the glut over the next few years." Another hot area, flat-panel display, which go into PCs and TVs, is starting to feel the effects of mounting overcapacity and things will get only worse as producers all rush to put the finishing touches on multi-bn-dollar expansions of their facilities. He offers a similarly dire analysis of cellphones. He cautions that 2/3 of all the wireless phones sold worldwide this year will be replacement units, and since consumers tend to upgrade their mobile phones every 3 or 4 years, simple math suggests a "slowdown is coming." And he would give the chip co's, Intel (INTC) first and foremost, wide berth. In fact, Intel is his largest bearish position. He also has bought puts on, among others, Texas Instruments (TXN), STMicroelectronics (STM), KLA Tencor (KLAC), Linear Technology (LLTC), Dell (DELL) and Research in Motion (RIMM). He's eager to do the same on Broadcom (BRCM), Silicon Labs (SLAB) and Applied Materials (AMAT) should the stocks bounce. He looks for bad news, too, from Ericsson (ERICY), Lexmark (LXK) and is steadfastly negative on Xilinx (XLNX), Maxim (MXIM) and Altera (ALTR). Tech bulls, Fred suggests, had "better find Noah's Ark" because, odds are, they'll be hit by a deluge of negative earnings warnings and more unsettling indications of inventory glut "over the next 40 days and 40 nights." High up on his shopping list are software stocks-Lawson Software (LWSN), Novell (NOVL), Compuware (CPWR), Siebel Systems (SEBL), Sybase (SY) and Netiq (NTIQ).