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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: B. J. Barron who wrote (7854)	7/1/1999 3:13:00 PM
From: OldAIMGuy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18928

Hi BJ, This might help both you and Keith. Great companies are much more like hard wood trees than sunflowers. They're not going to be around for just one season and then get picked over until there's nothing left. Year after year they grow and grow. Sure there can be droughts and high winds. They affect both the trees and the sunflowers. However, after the storms are gone, there's usually a good chance the hard woods will recover after a bit of pruning. The short term view of companies is to treat them like sunflowers and attempt to harvest all at once. AIM's like a good tree surgeon. It prunes the hardwood trees to keep them healthy and build mulch. The mulch is there to provide for soil enrichment in the future and the pruning protects the tree from storm damage. From a bunch of saplings in a field some are going to grow and become giants some are not. It's harder to tell from the saplings than from more established trees. When we first plant our yards, the saplings are the cheapest to buy, but have a higher failure rate. Getting one delivered "bare root" has to be done carefully and in the right season or failure is also high. We'll pay more for one that's balled, burlaped and 12' tall, but it has a much better survival rate. For some of us, a fruit or nut bearing tree is good. We need the harvest for our standard of living in retirement. Others don't require that sort of thing and only want steady strong growth. If we take into account the time to dig the hole, prepare the soil and plant the tree, it's probably better off if we get something that has a better survival rate. No use having to dig up and dispose of a dead sapling only to have to try to start another. If we plant carefully, we'll have it made in the shade! Hope I haven't gone too far out on a limb with this analogy! Best regards, Tom Veale - Branch Manager