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

To: OldAIMGuy who wrote (9522)	12/9/1999 8:37:00 PM
From: Steve Grabczyk	Respond to of 18928

O-K, O-K.... Maybe my "Eggs and Basket' metaphor was taken too literally. My approach is to think about my eggs as being in a basket; but each egg is an individual. If one falls out of the basket and breaks, the other don't jump out too! I was only trying to illustrate how I use one common cash reserve for all (now 7) issues in my AIM basket. I still keep a separate Newport holding on each one, dividing the cash by 7, and moving on from there. If I need cash in one, I'll 'borrow' from another. Newport's total return calculation is only value/$ invested anyway right? So if you add or subtract cash at anytime, it immediately changes the return %. I will try to calc the 'baskets' total, annualized, FIFO, LIFO and whatever other kind of return I can think of, but it's still just how many more $ you have now than when you started, right? Maybe I'll try this old idea I had......instead of calc'ing return rates ad infinitum, I take the $ gain divided by the # of days invested and think of it as my daily salary. Multiply that value by 365 and it's my annual income. I can relate to $. There's an old 'rule' in the retail business.....When a buyer tells you that their margin rate is 3 points higher than last year (but their sales are down 50%), your response is...."We don't pay the bills with percentage points". I'm rambling aren't I. Regards: Fuzzy in Fredricksburg

To: OldAIMGuy who wrote (9522)	12/9/1999 10:08:00 PM
From: Jack Jagernauth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18928

Thanks Tom, Bernie, Steve, I think I understand. It's better to AIM individual stocks and choose them carefully. Even blue chips get clobbered, and sometimes they move so slowly, it's like spending a 'lifetime' waiting for some mutual funds to generate AIM trades. It is very interesting to me how much we could know about expected returns before plunking down money. I back-tested a few stocks in PCA (nice job D1) 1. Blue chip - TRP.TO (a large Canadian utility) After 5 years, it provided a total AIM return of 17% (ouch!) and yesterday it got clobbered because they cut the dividend 30%. 2. Blue chip - CM.TO (a large Canadian dividend paying bank) After 5 years, it's AIM total return is 149% (not bad for a big bank, but it doesn't mean it'll provide a similar return going forward). 3. A miscellaneous stock - MNG.TO (a gold mining stock with on-going negative earnings, which I casually pulled out of a mutual fund I own). After just 2 years, it's AIM total return is 163%. B&H would be up 70% in this stock. I could have actually made good money owning this money losing beauty, instead of owning the precious mtls fund. Choosing the security to AIM makes a huge difference. Thanks again, Jack