*AV*--Thanks for your response. I spent some time looking at the trades and concluded 2 things. With the exception of EBNK, it looks to be more of a timing issue and a good portion of it fell outside of the scope of the newsletter, and what really was discussed here on Stock Swap.
I offer no excuses or rebuttals and your specifics helped to clarify things. What I was a timing problem during a very tenuous time in the industry downturn. The over riding philosophy of the newsletter and here has always been to let profits present themselves and to take advanatage of bargains.
In the specifc cases you mentioned, it looks as if it predated specific LLTs (Lower Limit Triggers). In your case, you would have exited much sooner and not at almost the bottom.
In my particular case, I personally added 2500 shares of WFR to my portfolio in January at $10 and saw it drop to $6 prior to the Rights Offering. I took advanatage of the Rights offering and made a very heavy commentary for readers to do the same. I also was buying on the way down. None of this makes a big difference whether I was able to average down or take advantage of the rights offering since my belief in the company was so solid, that this stock represented one of the top 5 stocks I knew would perform well in 1999. As many readers know, we sold shares in the high teens and low very 20s which made all $10, $6, and inbetween purchases profitable. And as I stated yesterday, I presently have alarge position which is more than $1 in the red right now. I will be waiting for the price hikes that will occur in 2000 (January)and the subsequent ramps of existing fabs and the 24 or so new fabs/expansions. We are not even conmsidering the number of 300mm fabs or concersions that might occur. We are at $11, we may see $8 or less, but we will be patient for $20 or more again. I will stock with this one comment though. That is, WFR went public a number of years ago at $24 and I see no reason for it not to reach that price again.
With that said, I still believe that at current valuation, WFR stands a good chance of doubling in price over the next 2 years. This is not a cop-out but rather a firm belief that a position now will yield a 100% return. The key to the newsletter is to recognize that even as positive as I am about this comment, when WFR hits, say, $18 or more, and is at a 50% profit position, we will not let the profits erode below the 40% level. We would much rather let WFR get away from us like AMAT did for you, then to see the profits erode.
Hopefully you will understand that I do see how you could have experienced a reversal of profits but we might have been able to minimize it through discussions. I am not 100% sure, and I know some of the readers could check it out and verify it, but off the top of my head, I do not believe we ever sold any ASYT, CYMI or WFR (we might have here with WFR) at a loss. We either added more shares to an average down or we sat tight and waited for the stock to run up again.
CFMT and SFAM have been laggards and we have beens tubborn about these stocks and are still holding on. On recent advances over the past year, we did take some profits, but for the most part they have been held tightly waiting for them to perform. I conisder these 2 stocks as failures since they did not double or triple yet.
ESIO and ASND I do not believe I ever spoke of other than to comment on a question posed to me and I made a response. I could be wrong but I did not find either in my stock archives.
ESFT - I had some $7 shares in a private account much like your major account, and saw it fall below $4 prior to talking about it here, once it got above $5 again. PAtience Paid off and I believe the $7 shares are close to 2 years old. Selling these shares for a 5X gain when we dumped some of the $5 stock for a 7X gain was worth the wait. To be honest, the $5 acqusitions was really done to average down to $6 and to be able to exit at break even or better on the similarities with COBT which went public a few weeks ago. Then is looked as if we thought this undiscovered gem might get a "sympathy run up" based on the psychotic exuberance of the run up of COBT shares.
The captial infusion by INTC was probably the main catalyst for the run up since the information about ESFT appeared under the INTC symbol. This caused the stampede. the key here was that we made the connection first, knew it was underfollowed, and aniticipated the mob psychology. It paid off and most of us were able to exit when we saw the stock start to cool off. The real interesting thing is that the lone analyst that followed the stock came out with the same commentary we had in the newsletter, at the recent price peak. From this observation, close to 2 weeks after we were vocal on it, ESFT started to back off.
ETEC - our timing has been equally as poor on this stock and we never were able to take real full advantage of some of the profit cycles.
I have YHOO,MSFT, AOL, CSCO, C
That is wonderful since you recognize the value of a dual portfolio. On Stock Swap and in the newsltter we are also talking about trading portfolios and not our conservative bread and butter stocks. We even have mentioned on a few occasions this past year to take some profits and roll then over into the more conservative portfolio.
As for some of the stocks in the conservative portfolio, I have C, MSFT and CSCO like you but refused to consider YHOO and AOL as conservative investments. To my mix we have DELL, SO, NTAP, COMS, QCOM, MOT, AMGN, JNJ, ERICY as examples. Occasionally some of these will appear in the trading account since I want to take advanatage of some price volatility, but they will go to the coffin with me clutching them to my chest<GGG>.
But you bring up a good point which I am very grateful for. Stock Swap and the newsletter should never reflect 100% of a person's portfolio. Only the speculative portion of a person's portfolio is ever discussed here and we do advocate that profits should sometimes be rolled over into the more conservative side of the portfolio. At least you are a savvy and intelligent investor and realize the need to keep investments separate from speculation. The real issue is what we all consider speculation versus investment. AOL and YHOO look to be investments for you and are speculation to me while CYMI and ASML are more investments for me and speculation to you. Neither of us are wrong since our perspective is different.
Anyway, I tried to keep it short (which I did not succeed at) and now understand how things transpired. Some of your positions would not have been losses had I continued to post here from October 1998 and not spent 120% of my time on the newsletter content. I know in the case of most of the stocks like ASYT, ESFT, CYMI, WFR, SFAM, AMAT and CFMT, I would have said to hold tight, grin and bear it, buy more, or just be patient for the profits. This was clearly evidenced by the comments made in the newsletter from the end of 1998 until present time. So for this, I partially blame myself for the discontinuity created by not being as vocal here. And of course it would have helped if you were a poster and put the question to me here since I feel I would have responded.
Either way, I do see where you are coming from and I recognize that withdrawing from this community in order to get the newsletter off the ground, caused 2 issues. First, it appears the thread went dormant and efforts to revitalize it by others and myself, have not brought it back to the free flowing and prolific thread that it was. And second, and you are a good example, some members and lurkers were left in the lurch with some investments. I figured I would get private mail from those people and handle the issues off line. Apparently that was not the case.
The only way to rectify this is nothing more than additional spamming here of stuff in the newsletter since I do not have time to create anything original here other than to answer specific questions or give an opinion on a stock. I am open for suggestions as long as it does not compromise the integrity of the newsletter and does not compromise the fee paying customers.
Andrew |
