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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Clarke who wrote (9052)	11/29/1999 1:01:00 AM
From: Michael Burry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78599

Jim, With your skills, I'd still expect you to be able to do better cherry-picking than using a shotgun short approach. I've been around the web tonight trying to buy a phone. Buy.com's site won't load. Amazon.com doesn't have what I'm looking for (something advertised in the local newspaper on sale at the local Target and/or Best Buy). Buyitnow and some others just are not smooth or easy to use. Operationally speaking, these online companies don't have it together yet. But they are just out there grabbing as much sales as possible. Compare this to WalMart, which held off its site launch in order to make sure everything would be A-OK smooth. I'm looking forward to the day when WalMart gets its online act together and does it right. For now, I'll just plan on stopping by Target tomorrow with newspaper ad in hand. And wait for the day when the Amazon's get their heads handed to them by superior management and marketing muscle. Mike

To: James Clarke who wrote (9052)	11/29/1999 8:12:00 AM
From: Daniel Chisholm	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78599

James, Another indication that your "short 'em all, let God sort 'em out" strategy might actually work out for you: I am going to be a significant buyer this Monday morning, of a number of stocks that you probably wouldn't (I hope!) have very much respect for. Seems that my trading portfolio (consisting entirely of shorts and cash) has been whacked about 40% since its pre-October high point and my decision at that time to lever up my shorts in preparation for the very real possibility of a meltdown that every fool and his dog knew about. Sound familiar? ;-) Prudence now demands that I cover a bit over half of my shorts. I've read about people suffering 35-40% drawdowns, and I've thought to myself "boy, that's gotta hurt". It turns out I didn't even know the half of it. So am I capitulating, and is this yet another signal of the top? Perhaps. But there may yet be quite a bit more craziness to go - any time I am honest with myself, the only answer I can come up with is "I don't know". I guess when you cover your Amazon short, that might turn out to be this market's last ever buyer of fluff.... there will be no one left to short then. I'm still going to continue to short stocks, hold cash and buy the occasional value stock (how about more of that USU, eh? ;-). It's just that I'll be doing so with a smaller capital base... :-( - Daniel