Frank, I do appreciate your help. You have been a strong contributor to this thread with good insight and valuable information.
I also agree and practice your strategy of "buy and hold" with the bulk of my portfolio. These are my "core holdings" and they are spread between Equity Funds and stocks, I consider "safe" long term investments (HWP, INTC, MSFT, CSCO) with excellent growth prospects. These I don't feel a need to track daily (or hourly) and have held for years.
With a much smaller portion of my porfolio I do speculate in short term(3 - 6 month) trades and options based on stocks I believe have a good short term upside(or downside) potential. This is the "sport" of investing for me.
For me personally, SIII is a stock that falls into the latter category. Looking at its chart, if you bought and held since the IPO, you could have tripled your money, but it also shows the stock has had one huge rally between 7/94 and 7/95 when it first topped $20. Since then it has been on roller coaster with lots of peaks and valleys.
I'm long since Nov because based on my analysis it looked like S3 was in a valley at $17 - $18 and had a shot at another quick short term peak in the mid twenties based on Q4 results, strong analyst recs., the small cap, Jan. effect, and the prior pre-earning run-up in Q3. This obviously hasn't happened and if SIII doesn't break $20 based on next week news(with no options expiration to effect it), I see this as a bad indicator for this stock.
Unlike you and others I'm not yet convinced that S3 is a stock that deserves the status of "Long Term Buy and Hold" in my portfolio. This is mainly based on my belief that the multimedia chip industry is in a state of tremendous evolution right now and even well managed, market leaders like S3 can be squashed in a matter of months by new developments or large competitors. In the same breath I also recognize they may emerge a winner with huge rewards for those that stay the course. The jury is still out in my mind. Stay tuned.
For every Intel, and Microsoft, there are plenty of Wangs and Novells, stocks plenty of people thought were "Long Term Holds". (They usually just don't admit it in public). ;-) |
