Hi Jay,
Your words have the bear and bleak sounds of my thoughts. Here in the states they say MBAs are still being snatched up - but I wonder if the govt employment numbers are inaccurate and not reflecting the beginning of our slowdown. I have been of the opinion that Alan Greenspan has orchestrated a hard landing.
Your words of Yahoo! go right to my pain. We bought our last Yahoo! in January, pre-split $445, just shy of their January high. Unfortunately, it still sits in the Portfolio.
Our broker who was at Gruntal has moved to First Union. Since we don't like the broker Gruntal assigned to our account or First Union (we bank there) we are in the market for a new broker. My husband has been interviewing ... but we will not move our account until after January 1 - wanting a clean end of the year statement of our account.
We are leaning toward a firm we have never heard of, Tucker Anderson. We are 1/10th of 10 family accounts (brokerage, IRAs, and trusts) that will move together.
We are anxious to move as soon as possible after 1/1/01, since the company that owns Gruntal, Home Insurance (I think), is in receivership. These last 2 years we have been treated to free box tickets at pro ice hockey and baseball games, conferences and presentations, limo trips to NYC where we were given a tour of Gruntal and met Joe Battaglia (sp), their CNBC bull analyst. We had a hard time not laughing at how graciously we were treated in NYC. I guess we were supposed to be impressed by meet Joe B.
We lost lots more than those perks.
It is water over the dam, but it bugs me that the broker disagreed with my sell requests, convincing my husband to hold - each month from May to November. Each time the stocks I wanted to sell tanked over and over. We are probably down 60-75% from my first sell request. At least I managed to get them to sell INTC, JDSU, SDLI, JDSU being our largest positions. They are all down more than 60% from where we sold. My sole reason for selling INTC was because IMO they had too much income from their VC investments. I wanted a company whose earnings came from their business.
My husband has finally agreed we could not have done worse if he had given in to my sells. Who knows, we might have reinvested and still be in the weeds. We might have bought Softbank 9984! LOL
The HK stocks, except for 648, were relatively small investments (losses) - even PCCW investment was less than 648 and PCCW loss is far less than 648.
My gut tells me we will probably see the Naz hit 2000 and that may not be a bottom. At least we don't buy on margin. Puts and calls scare me, but perhaps they would have been better than sitting pat.
I am not looking at the portfolio very often these past weeks. CNBC has been replaced by MSNBC & Fox since our political mess began on 11/8. If the political situation here every ends and we have a small rally, I will push to sell. IMO there will be a rally, but it will be a dead cat bounce.
By the way, you are becoming a big SI celebrity on the Coming Financial Crisis... board. I have received a few PMs on your posts and someone PM'd me links to posts they thought I should read - yours.
Thanks for your cautious words.
Skol,
Merry |
