Plots and hindsight....
Joe responded to Igor: "As Dick Smith showed you with the plots, I'd rather have held COMS than CSCO for last 5 years."
True, but the real truth is, of course, that the past is past and we should be worrying about the future. Hindsight doesn't make any of us any money. Clearly, Joe, you know this, as you go on to say "The value of a stock is based on its future earnings potential..." and other things that should have us thinking in the right direction.
Which is, of course, what we try to do here. And we don't always agree, and it's better to discuss these things, and try to understand what each other is saying, so that we all understand the Street and the World better than other people....
I'm always suspicious, though, about techie types (as many of us are, here) trying to understand the market. Sometimes I think that we have a better understanding than "The Street" does, but they're much bigger than we are (at least in dollars) and they move the market. This must be even more important for those who are doing short-term things than buy-and-hold types like myself... but everyone who looks at the prices every day, and who gets nervous when the guy on the radio says "the market is really tumbling today" until you get at the real numbers and figure out that it's a lousy 1/2 percent, and the Dow move is just one stock, and tomorrow the radio guy'll say something equally exciting because he has to fill his 5 minutes on the every day or else they'd make him talk about basketball or fire him.
Back to Igor's charts... my original point was that Igor said something like "COMS has been bad for five years against CSCO" and I looked at a 5-year chart, and saw that they'd mostly run together for the first four years, and that, actually, COMS had been a little higher. And I tried to explain that, although I wasn't sure what the point was. And I agreed that COMS has sucked, for the last 7-8 months, against CSCO... no question of that.
But let's go back to the future. If we look at the past too much, we'll work ourselves into a frenzy about Pfizer, or Netscape, or whatever, and pretty soon we'll be talking about when we should have bought Tabulator or Halide or some other damn fool thing that happened before we were born. Which is fun to dream about, but won't even pay the Internet bill....
And that's enough philosophy for tonight.
My best to you all,
Dick |
