| Hello everybody that's left. I'm no longer a shareholder of 9984. Fortunately for me I bought at around the present price. But many people posting on this thread had a lot of their personal hopes for the future riding on Softbank. So when I think about it I'm sad, for them. Well we can always get instruction from failure as well as from success. It seems to me that from the beginning we knew too little about the many investments of Softbank. Some of them are wonderful ideas. Here in Toronto, my wife simply loves to order groceries online. It is so wonderfully convenient. I don't know about the company that we deal with but WEBVAN in which Softbank has a substantial investment isn't close to making money. It seems the consumer is getting not most but ALL of the benefit from a lot of these cool new economy businesses. The investors are getting none. Our mistake was in investing in a business where we knew only the general idea not the substantiating details. One fact that emerged fairly early was that the Japanese public was not taking their expiring high interest deposits to the stock market. I should have sold as soon as I found that out. Another thing that emerged later was the fact that the various companies backed by Softbank seem to have very little to do with each other. So there is no synergy, which was part of the dream. We have to ask ourselves constantly "how do I know that what I believe is true?" Looking back I remember that almost all my big profits in the stock market were from long term holdings in such dominant companies as Polaroid, Xerox, IBM, DEC, Fujitsu(when an infant), Microsoft and more recently NTAP and VRTS. I am much influenced by a book called the Gorilla Game. A company that controls a technology that almost everybody MUST use is a wonderful investment. Microsoft before the trial and the internet was a fine example. People like Buffett can make money in insurance and banks and Coke but that's harder than tech investing, I think. There's no substitute for study. Otherwise we get frightened by market dips and that's the straight road to disaster. I personally think the chances of getting rich from trading are slim compared to the probabilities for returns from investing in companies with semi-monopolistic control. QCOM is said to be such a company. I've bought a little but I'm afraid because I don't understand some things. I don't know why Nokia and DoCoMo have every intention of using QCOM's next generation technology but they haven't indicated any intention of paying QCOM for it, though patents cover it. At least I know that I don't understand. That's the best way. It's called the scientific method. I wish you all a happier future in the stock market and suggest the Gorilla and King thread on Siliconinvestor as a good place to learn things and the book Gorilla Game, 2nd Edition, as a good beginning point for study. |
