I do not spend much time trading stocks. In fact, with one exception I have not bought or sold any stocks in almost ten months. Pretty boring, eh? The exception was that I sold half my GlobalStar position (generating some tax losses) to buy more Qualcomm when the Ericsson deal was announced. If my wife would have let me, I would have been maxing out my credit cards on that one. I would have been maxing out her cards, too, but noooooo, we had to have food and pay the mortgage. Hey, I could have stood to lose a few pounds!
Anyway, thanks to my investments in Lucent and Qualcomm (va-va-va-voom!) and hanging on to the Leap distribution, I made pretty good money over the last twelve months (90%+) in spite of Zenits, soldering irons, and politicians clobbering my positions in GlobalStar and Loral. Not that I'm so smart -- I just found Mqurice, Valueman, and Gregg's arguments persuasive, and put all my eggs in some pretty good baskets.
I'm getting ready to move some money back into GlobalStar. I understand that in the long run it will not matter much whether I do it now or wait until later in the summer, but I'm thinking about it.
The question Goodboy is asking is how far down will GSTRF go, where most of us are asking the quite different but related question, when will it start moving up.
The concensus here -- and I am in agreement -- seems to be that there will be no significant upward movement in GlobalStar's stock price until the satellites are up, the network is running, handsets are moving through the various distribution paths, and millions (dare I say, billions?) of minutes are being sold. This process should begin in September -- or maybe a little later, because we may have to wait a while for subscriber numbers.
In the meantime, the Iridium effect, launch anxiety, etc., will combine to keep things down. I have a standing order to buy a bunch of GSTRF at 12. I think it may get that low or lower on really bad news from Iridium, but I won't be able to keep a close enough eye on things to time the bottom any closer. If it never gets that low, fine. I'll buy at the market on good news, but no later than August. Since the GSTRF money I took out and put in QCOM has tripled, more or less, I'll be putting more back than I took out.
Here's to a nice, boring series of launches! And it is time to start cranking up the old marketing machine!
(By the way, for anyone interested in how marketing works, I'm currently reading PERMISSION MARKETING, by Seth Godin, VP direct marketing for YAHOO. Very interesting, useful, turn your head around stuff. Mqurice, I think you should read this.) |
