>>I think every stock you mentioned was a great short at one point in time or another. They don't have to be shares of SolvEx at 30 to be a great short.
True enough, Barb, but now we're splitting hairs, no?
My wife owns a relative boatload of Yahoo (something like 20% of her portfolio), and she just shakes her head when I trade it in my account. Her basis is something like $15-20. I know damn well that one of these days this stock is going to leave me wishing again I hadn't previously sold it. It has happened once already.
There are stocks that I have had consistent sellers remorse about. Usually when that happens (Siebel is a perfect case this month: bought at 16, sold at 38, bought at 41, sold at 41, bought Friday at 42), I find it's better to just put the stock away. I've owned AOL off and on for years, always made money on it, and sold it when the gain seemed too good to be true. I would have been far-better off putting AOL away.
Wednesday it looked like the world was ending, that we had finally entered a cyclical bear market or worse, that deflation was spreading east from Asia, etc. All it took was Alan Greenspan's reassurance that the US banking system was in no way threatened by the Asian crisis (he oughtta know), and bingo market worries about deflation turn into convictions of renewed disinflation, and the market gets its life back. Amazing. |
