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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (32540)	9/21/1999 7:44:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Anyone see any holes in my logic or facts Real interest rates are near an all-time high of 4%+(historically they have averaged around 2-3%) so if anything, the Fed should be thinking of loosening, not tightening, the money supply. One of these days the market will recognize this fact. The PEs of CSCO, AMAT, INTC, etc are still at their all-time highs, What of it? If you had used this logic any year for the past decade on companies like MSFT, DELL, CSCO, and had gone short, you would have had your head handed to you. The trend for IC penetration is only growing stronger. Why would you bet against this? We are at an historic inflection point, yet many Bears fail to see the writing on the wall, thinking they know better. Somehow this strong technology trend will revese course!! What arrogance they have! Opportunities like this do not present themselves often. America's technology infrastructure companies(AMAT among them) are the nexis through which all countries will come for the forseeable future. Your strategy may make you money in the ST, but would probably have been a better one when the Dow was at 11200+ BK

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (32540)	9/21/1999 9:07:00 PM
From: Robert O	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

I guess the more conservative approach would be to sell covered calls. While munching on captured premium dollars, continue to sell more at each interval down. In this fashion you 'win' in a plateau-ing mrkt. or just slightly decreasing mrkt. versus puts. Only given a 'decent' sized drop does your put play pay off nicely for the considerable risk of puts expiring worthless in flat mrkt. You said yourself you only wanted to 'hedge my overvalued portfolio against [an expected 20%] market decline?' What if it's only 5% down then right back on the steady tech march we know and love? My background commands me to tell you that a L-T buy and hold strategy is always best. Plus, you may remember my take: feel the bid/ask, MM game playing, trade costs, bizarre 'unfair' pricing of options (option index plays to be sure) are not worth the investment given the risk/return profile. Having said all that it does appear like this may be the start of a downturn although it really didn't 'clobber' large cap techs today like the beg. of a true big-time mudslide would. Oh, if I remember right you did quite well with calls on AMAT so maybe you have the 'Midas' timing touch... just can't believe ANYONE would Put CSCO... literally, at any time at any price. It's near-magical. FWIW, RO