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To: eddie r gammon who wrote (3589)	1/22/2000 4:09:00 PM
From: Lucretius	Respond to of 42523

not necessarily

To: eddie r gammon who wrote (3589)	1/22/2000 5:21:00 PM
From: 10K a day	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42523

Combine the words: Bullish & It.

To: eddie r gammon who wrote (3589)	1/22/2000 5:50:00 PM
From: Lucretius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42523

in fact, a falling yen is exactly what i think will set off the debacle.... the world economy cannot recover until the yen is allowed to soar and the purchasing power of the Japanese people unleashed to be the engine of demand. you'll not that when the yen began to fall in late December is exactly coincident w/ the top in the internuts and you'll note that the cyclicals are now collapsing... a dollar rallying against the yen will also put a bid under the bond and collapse commodities which is what we have been waiting for to begin the melt. of course as US stocks melt, the euro will rise against the dollar as Europeans flee US equities and THAT should give us a gold rally... but we'll see....

To: eddie r gammon who wrote (3589)	1/23/2000 9:09:00 AM
From: re3	Respond to of 42523

from the toronto star today... Forum may help provide alternatives to mutual funds THE MONTH of January gets on my nerves. Every year the dull, cold and damp weather seems harder to take. It's also registered retirement savings plan season, and my tolerance for those corny mutual fund ads is getting lower all the time. I look forward to the end of the Financial Forum, which runs Thursday, Jan. 27 through Sunday, Jan. 30 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, because it means the longer days of February and March are just around the corner. And so are the days when the mutual fund ad blitz subsides to a dull roar. This year's forum boasts more than 60 seminars. Unfortunately most of the speakers are from sponsoring mutual fund companies, and it's inevitable their advice will reflect that. I can't imagine fund managers predicting they will stink next year, and they always say the future is so bright we'll all need sunglasses. Some refreshing and not nearly so boring information may be found at a seminar Thursday at 11 a.m. by John O'Donnell, whose Online Trading Academy helps do-it-yourself investors learn how. The irreverent, entertaining Duff Young, a portfolio doctor and independent mutual fund analyst, is on Thursday at 3:30 p.m., and always draws a crowd. Unfortunately the Chicago Board Options Exchange at 9:30 a.m. Friday clashes with Eric Kirzner, a University of Toronto professor of finance and advocate of index investing. I would also bend an ear to Dale Ennis of Canadian MoneySaver magazine on Saturday at 5:00 pm. The forum is traditionally an important showcase for the mutual fund industry and this year's forum could involve major sales promotion efforts. The companies must be concerned about last year's drop in mutual fund sales even though all major world stock markets advanced to record highs. The financial media have presented many reasons for the drooping sales over the past three years, but I think the investing public has simply decided that there is no longer a compelling reason to buy. Consider the industry's traditional approach of preaching the benefits of professional managers, diversification and buy-and-hold. Then consider last year's collapse of the once-high-flying AIC Advantage Fund; and the success of the Altamira e-business fund and Fidelity Japanese Growth Fund. These results had nothing to do with professional management. The good or bad results were sector-related. If you bought Japan and technology, you won. If you bought financial services, you lost. The diversification argument is also weak. Investors are learning about the many index-linked products now available. They are liquid, offer diversity and are cheap to own. These products are also well-suited for a buy and hold strategy. You buy and sell them like a single stock, but, in fact, they give you ownership of a basket of stocks and their dividends, minus a small management fee. Among the index products are the Toronto Stock Exchange's TIPS units, which let you buy the basket of stocks in the TSE 35 index, and the new i60 units, based on the S&P/TSE 60 index. You can also have exposure to most foreign markets via index-linked products. The red-hot Nasdaq index, for example, can be bought like a stock on the American Stock Exchange under symbol QQQ. And the units are extremely liquid. When I checked one day this week at 2 p.m., 7 million shares had already changed hands at around $191 (U.S.). You could throw $10 million at it and not even budge the price. In the last six months of 1999, the units returned about 83 per cent; meanwhile the actively managed Altamira e-business fund returned about 85 per cent. I call that a good example of a fund manager simply treading water in a hot sector. Other possibilities available on the American Stock Exchange include World Equity Benchmark Shares, or WEBS. Versions of WEBS cover markets that include Japan, Germany, Hong Kong and Mexico. I logged on to the stock exchange's Web site www.amex.com and downloaded the WEBS prospectus in less than a minute. You should, too. The duties of well-regarded Barclays Global Fund Advisors as manager of the WEBS program and of Morgan Stanley & Co. as trustee are spelled out in plain English. Our chart this week compares weekly closes (plus last Wednesday's close) of the Japan WEBS and the Tokyo Nikkei index. As you'd expect of a product that is supposed to track an index, both charts trend together and both charts broke up above their down-trends in the first quarter of 1999. To date, the up-trend on both charts remains in place, but I suspect that a corrective down-leg is just around the corner. A correction of at least one-third would be a good entry point for investors who missed out on the first up-leg last year. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------