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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: werefrog who wrote (39621)	3/22/2000 6:10:00 PM
From: Valley Girl	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 74651

I was also trading softee in '89, and I remember thinking how clever I was to make now-trifling sums buying and selling options positions. I really only started making serious money in the stock when I left it alone for years. It's very hard for most of us to believe successful traders are anything more than a sample that's been self-selected for the lucky few. If there was such a thing as a near-foolproof trading strategy, wouldn't the big houses long since have employed it and, in the process, ruined the game for themselves and everyone else? Take 1000 traders operating randomly and you will invariably get a bell-curve distribution of performance that includes a few big winners. It's like those newspaper stock-picking contests that are always won by a person that takes their entire capital and plows it into some high-risk, high-reward gamble; 100s of them try that strategy and one of them is bound to win at it, effectively ruining the contest for stock-pickers who pattern their behaviour on what they'd do if real money were involved. Even if you can claim a "track record" of sorts, it's probably still not an accurate reflection of performance in all market conditions, because we've been in an unusual bull run for many years now. Also, it's no fair comparing performance on a percentage basis if you're making trades with a small fraction of a large capital pool that's not counted in the denominator; that large backstop stands between you and many ill effects of making a bad trade, and is therefore relevant. If I understand correctly from earlier posts you trade $100Ks while keeping $million(s) in safe debt-oriented securities and cash equivalents. I doubt seriously you'd take pure trading positions with 80% of your capital. Certainly, for most people, buy and hold remains the best approach to investing. Cheers! (A smug holder of a long-term winner)