Gvander-thanks for your post. I AM pleased that you are still with us and appreciate your feedback. Your first post definitely left questions concerning your motives. Your later posts have helped me understand where you are coming from. I re-read some of my own and appropriately concluded that I must sometimes come across as a hypester.
I admit my IOM posts were probably obnoxious and perhaps didn't belong there- for which I apologize. My guess is that If you hadn't found them, we wouldn't have heard from you in the first place. The result, however, is that we have gained some valuable insight for which I thank you for. I hope you keep posting.
I feel I owe an explanation. I have closing prices for IOM that I recorded back in 1987. I had followed but never bought any. When it ran to 20 and then 25 etc. I figured I had missed my chance. I finally bought some around the first of this year at slightly over 17. New information made me conclude that I was better off in VLNC and sold at a $1900 loss. At the time of my post VLNC was at 5 1/2, now 6 3/4.
I have owned stocks that were highly-hyped as decribed in your referenced article. At least 3 of them went to zero and the brokerage firms disappeared or changed names to avoid lawsuits. Some of them showed up at other firms. I have written off these experiences as tuition.
Like many of you, I have paid my dues and now deserve to feel much more confident about what I am doing.
I'm at an age where I should think about retirement, and because I have never found an opportunity I was more sure of in terms of risk vs reward, have un-diversied and placed almost everything in Valence, nearly twice the value of my home. In order to do so, I have borrowed all I can, and have max-ed several credit cards. As VLNC moves up, I buy more on margin. The uncertainty is not whether it will go up, but how much. As you may have read in my previous posts, I have based a large part my decision on the what how I feel about the people invovled.
Perhaps a greater risk I have taken is to suggest to people I care about, who have helped me and I would like to do something nice for, that they should invest in VLNC.
I will be known either as a fool or as a genius, but no one will say I didn't have the guts to act when the right opportunity was presented!
Incidentally, my conversation with Alliant Tech yesterday was with Dick Jowett, customer/public relations 612-931-6080. |
