This year has been a frustrating one for many investors. If you own the FANG stocks (FB, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG) you are a happy camper. If you find them overpriced and over-owned and don’t wish to pay a lot to own companies that earn little money, then you aren’t keeping up. In the midst of that environment, technology stocks, in general, have been viewed as the one place with a chance to survive disruption and upheaval — or they might be the disruptors themselves. Of course, tech stocks always are more volatile.

Not all the action has been in Silicon Valley upstarts with big initial public offerings. One very old tech stock, Advanced Micro Devices, began to execute one of the great turnarounds of recent times in 2016. AMD was at $2 or less early last year, clearly on the junk pile of disbelief.

You surely remember the TV ads decades ago featuring “Intel Inside” a Dell or HP desktop PC you might buy for your home or office. The principal competitor to Intel's PC chips was AMD. It turned out that illegal payments to Dell from Intel created an almost monopolistic environment freezing AMD out even when its Opteron chips were considered superior. Eventually, the dirt came out in public and AMD collected a legal settlement of $1.2 billion from Intel that kept it going for many years. Dell also paid extensive fines to the SEC and other regulators.

As is often the case when companies become fit for the graveyard, women are given a chance to run them. Now and then, the woman is truly exceptional and she is able to succeed with a turnaround. Dr. Lisa Su was trained at MIT and then spent 13 years at IBM. She is an accomplished electrical engineer with particular focus on manufacturing technologies and design of efficient semiconductor chips. Su arrived at AMD in 2012 from Freescale, a Motorola spin-off.

When Su became president and CEO in 2014, AMD had a debt-laden balance sheet and “me, too” products they were forced to sell at discount prices. Su proudly observed on analyst day Tuesday that AMD now has $1.2 billion of cash on its balance sheet. That allows the company to invest in its own future with confidence and to enter new markets with leading, not following, products.

In recent years, as the PC market went soft, Su was determined to set the company on a new course and worked toward evaluating new markets that offered continued growth. That gives the company an opportunity to increase its gross profit margins and, in turn, its earnings per share. As the turnaround began to unfold in 2016, AMD became one of the best-performing stocks, even in the tech sector, and it surged to $14 in recent months.

In early May, AMD matched its expected first-quarter results but didn’t blow out the lights. Forward “guidance” was not ebullient. Investors got cranky. In a matter of just two days, the stock was whacked from $13.62 on May 1 to 9.94 on May 3, a drop of 27 percent and totally inappropriate for what had happened.

Within two weeks, the stock had regained its footing and began to regroup. On Tuesday, AMD surged higher to close at $12.75. At its analyst day, the company demonstrated technically exciting new chips for the PC, server and gaming markets. Management said it views 2017 as an inflection point toward profitability as it pivots toward more high-end, competitive products. It still lost money in 2016 but management laid out its revised goals with the new industry-leading products to increase gross profit margins from greater than 36 percent in 2018 to a new target of more than 40 percent in 2020.

Like all companies that have been doubted for years, it will take more time for analysts and investors to believe that AMD is for real and not a temporary flash in the pan. Those doubts, along with the wild swings in the stock price, are what create opportunity.

We own AMD and Intel. Joan E. Lappin CFA founded Gramercy Capital Management, a Registered Investment Advisor, in 1986. She is known for her unique perspective, her stock-picking abilities and her analytical skills honed by decades in the investment business. She would love to hear from you at jlappinCFA@gmail.com Follow her observations on politics and the world around her on Twitter: @joanlappin. Read past columns at deducedreckoning.blogs.heraldtribune.com and heraldtribune.com/topics/joan-lappin. Neither she, Gramercy Capital nor its clients own any security mentioned in this article.