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Strategies & Market Trends : 50% Gains Investing

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To: Dale Baker who wrote (21170)10/1/2000 8:54:11 AM
From: Dale BakerRead Replies (1) of 118717
 
Fund managers are such wimps - ;<)

DO INDIVIDUALS PANIC IN MARKET DECLINES?
Many Wall Street experts share a concern that inexperienced individual
investors will panic during the sudden corrections that periodically
occur in the stock market. These individuals may react by dumping stock
professionals worry, exaggerating market declines.

But who really panics in market declines? The results of recent research
by two finance professors, Patrick Dennis of the University of Virginia
and Deon Strickland of Ohio State University, indicate that a far bigger
worry should be the behavior of Wall Street's institutional investors --
those professionals who manage more than $100 million.

Mark Hulbert, in a recent New York Times article, notes that the finance
professors "studied all the trading days from 1988 to 1996 on which the
stock market dropped more than 2% percent." If individuals tended to
panic in these declines, it would be expected that stocks with little
institutional ownership would fall the most on these days. If
institutions tended to panic, then stocks with high institutional
ownership would fall the furthest.

The result? "The stocks that fell the most were those most owned by
institutions," Hulbert notes. "Conversely, the stocks that fell the
least were those with the lowest levels of such ownership." It appears
from this study that institutions tend to be more likely to react
spontaneously in an adverse market than individuals, selling stocks at
temporarily reduced prices to their detriment.

Why do Wall Street managers exhibit this behavior? Hulbert concludes
that "institutional investors are much more afraid of being alone at the
bottom of the rankings than they are eager to be at the top. After all,
a dead-last finish could well result in firing. Running somewhere in the
pack -- even if lagging behind the market -- is unlikely to draw much
attention."

Hulbert concludes that owning stocks with high institutional ownership
could make a portfolio more volatile as the professionals quickly dump
shares in market declines. But he claims that this behavior could create
investment opportunities for individuals if institutional selling gets
overdone. The entire academic study on this issue can be downloaded at
gates.comm.virginia.edu
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