Mark:
It's illuminating to scroll a weekly chart of say DELL, INTC, CSCO, MSFT, SUNW et al backwards (easy on Q-Charts) and observe the number of times in their prolonged runup periods where there were pullbacks when you could easily have been persuaded to sell a core position.
I convinced myself I could do this early in 1997 with DELL, so I started swing trading a portion of my DELL holding, and just held the rest. While I was pretty successful in picking tops/bottoms within 25% or so, overall the swing trading approach over a two year period, with trading commissions and ST gains taxes deducted, was only marginally better than the buy and hold approach and LT gains taxes (and about 20% better in a tax free IRA with no taxes) - a lot of work for not much additional gain, and impractical with a diversified portfolio.
If you run this kind of exercise with any of the present big caps at a comparable time in their histories to where PALM is now, or during the years where they had (overall) sustained runups, you get the same kind of result. This convinces me that PALM is not one to try and trade, as long as the business fundamentals and revenue growth remain strong.
JMO.
David T.
P.S. Even if I wanted to sell, I'd need to get executive approval from the 50% partner! |
