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Technology Stocks : Softbank Group Corp -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (3134)	1/8/2000 2:14:00 PM
From: Netwit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6018

I want to thank everyone for your comments. I think there was a lot of good advice there. I think I'm going to try to use a strategy where I always have some cash on hand for these situations, maybe that will mean skimming off the top in frothy markets or tightening my stops. I would rather end up sitting on a small pile of cash at the bottom so that I can bottom fish. I'm not sure exactly how I'll implement this. Although at first I think I'm just going to say 10% of my money dedicated to technology stocks sits in cash as a crash suit. The cost of course is that that money will be unproductive during a part of the year, but it will help me sleep at night and I'll think of the lost opportunity cost as the price of insurance. I don't really play around with puts. I don't understand them well enough and my broker (Schwab) won't let me use them in a retirement account, where I do all of my trading for tax reasons. I am also going to look at TA to see if there are any useful indicators (say, VIX or Candlestick charts) to help determine points to pull in some cash and tightened stops when storms are brewing. I used to just buy and hold, but I actually lost a lot of money that way riding the train down the other side of the mountain. Now, the most I'm willing to do for a stock is give it a trailing stop and stick with it so long as it doesn't break it's trend line. I did get stopped out of some stocks during this upheaval. I have pretty loose stops on these stocks (I use a 14 day ATR (average trading range)multiplied by 2.5). That really gives the stocks a lot of room to move around. I mean if you are 2.5 times outside of your daily trading range (which is pretty large for technology stocks)something pretty significant must be going on. Watching a $100,000 loss turn into a $175,000 loss with no end in site and no dry powder to help fuel me out of those losses was just to tough for me. So I'll try keeping some powder dry and see if I weather the next storm better. I do think it's all about the individual finding their own comfort point and I thank you all for your generousity.