If you had asked me last December to pick 2 stocks to put all of my assets in, I would have picked QCOM and GMST. QCOM is off 58% YTD and GMST is up only 1.4%. My "B" list of stock holdings YTD:
ITWO + 93%
NTAP +209%
SEBL +130%
RMBS +281%
JDSU +25%
Sometimes a dollop of diversification is of great benefit, because you never know which of your "sure" areas will work
I appreciate that Rel4490.
I'm glad your holdings are doing so well.
But again, you've picked a time frame of 10.5 months. Again, it depends on one's time horizon, or time frame, as I mentioned before. You can point to JDSU at 25% now, but earlier in the year it was much higher, and my hope would be in 3 years, much higher still. Same with Rambus, looking it at it in March, vs. Oct, vs. December 2001. I have no idea where it'll be.
Same for Qcom, and so on. Just saying that picking the first 10 months of this year to determine that a plan or a selection has worked, doesn't make sense by itself, without also including what the time frame is, and what one's expectations are. For example, the majority of my money is in Qcom: great decision last year, bad one this year. But should I judge this year at all, or make any judgment, since I'm hoping to hold over 5-10 years? Seems sort of pointless, as long as the underlying fundamentals haven't changed. Where the stock stands in Jan., or June., or Oct, isn't so important to me as where it is Jan 2005: that's what's really important to me, and will be the determinant of whether my stockpicking has been "successfull" or not.
The rest of it, being able to say how "successful" my portfolio looks now vs., last March, vs. next January, is sort of pointless because it's a moving target. The portfolio will fluctuate from moment to moment with the vagaries of the market, Greenspan, war, famine, the CPI, etc, etc. It's nothing more than ego satisfaction, or ego deflating, as the case may be. That time frame that really does count is determined on an individual basis for each investor. Jan 2001 isn't very crucial to me, but it may be profoundly crucial to someone who is retiring that month, or for other reasons.
Best,
Apollo |
