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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (9134)	10/29/1999 9:41:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 54805

OT Margin burned to a crisp I have avoided severe margin trama by keeping two accounts with the same broker. One has a few thousand shares of hold only stock. Should the other margin account hit a snag I can transfer shares in a matter of minutes to cover, never had to yet! This year I tried to see if it would increase my gains to enter into the Oct season pretty much fully invested and use the margin to pick up bargains. It has not been as successfull for two reasons. 1) I was not forced to cull the losers and marginal gainers as much as if I had actually tried to raise a cash position, so I am still stitting on some stocks that seem to have a lot of potential but aren't living up to it. 2) I've seen some good opportunities, but not sure things, and since I was on margin I passed on them. I also bought smaller quantities of some issues that I had high confidence in. The margin idea makes me too timid to make some of the moves necessary to win if you are going to play a timing game. Next year I will try to make the hard choices in the summer of reducing stocks that I like very much but maybe aren't meeting my expectations (MSFT & IBM come to mind, but I'll give them through springtime). TP