<OT> Yikes!!
"You own cpq? Yikes!"
You said it -- Yikes! But CPQ was not Yikes! when I originally bought it. Same goes for all the other Yikes! that have sabotaged my portfolio over the past few years. When purchased, they all had excellent valuation ratios, great peg ratios, good balance sheets, plenty of free cash flow, etc. But then, bingo! A stumble, and down as much as 50%-60% in one day, or a gradual slide that never ended when by all rights it should have.
Some of the stocks (e.g., Oxford Health) deserved their fate; in other cases, IMO, investors over-reacted -- and stayed over-reacted.
Amopng my YIKES!, past and present:
OXHP (I saw this one coming, but too lazy to get out in time)
WDC (It looked beautiful -- once.)
MLHR (Definitely did not deserve its fate.)
TDW, ESV, MAVK (You all know what happened to these.)
etc., etc., etc......
I held a bunch of oil service stocks (bought near their highs in 1987), and the only one I had left was CLB. Now look! (Copious tears.)
Such blows to my pocketbook have only served to convince me that if one does not have the temperament to be a day-trader, and/or does not have the time to follow every stock one owns on a daily basis (as well as the industries they are in), it is better to buy mutual funds (both indexes and managed funds).
Today was a good day on Wall Street, and my funds were up 1.74% Hurray! My portfolio of stocks, however, was down 1.50%. Boo!
jbe
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