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To: SecularBull who wrote (6457)	4/14/2000 1:25:00 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8096

That was smart Loffy. I panicked a bit this morning and sold a few things in order to get out of my cnxt April 70s. ALl other puts are underwater but good chance of recovery since they are May and June and decent strikes. We're down 155 now (you'll probably read this latter). Could be a sucker rally but I tend to think the worst is over. Many people have been facing margin calls. What to do? I was speaking to Tom (Voltaire) and thought I would pass this on: He just talked to a woman on SI who has a $5 million dollar account. Overnight her brokerage firm raised her margin requirement from 750K to $1.5 million (they said she was overly weighted in certain positions). If she hadn't known better she would've had to sell a ton of stock to meet the call and her portfolio would've been down a few million. Instead she wrote leaps cc on all her positions. At first they said she couldn't do that (it's their discretion I guess) but when she talked to a higher up and was firm about it they said okay. (Apparently they always do). She has completely saved her account by generating all that extra cash and is out of the "call." OTOH, one says, will all her stock get called away? Probably not. What she does is, as the stock appreciats, she buys back the calls at a loss. Then she has a tax loss, but she still comes out ahead (stock will appreciate more than the cost of buying back the calls). She holds onto her stock and is far better off that way. A lot of conspiracy theories have been batted around here and one has to wonder--in this market, on this day, for someone to get a call about doubling margin maintenance. I bet many others got calls like that and just sold their stock at lows, that mms and houses picked up. I doubt I'll have a margin call (I sold ahead of any danger) but if I did I could see covering all my QCOM with leaps, and doing the same thing she did.