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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: freeus who wrote (22894)	4/17/2000 1:01:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

freeus, Not to single you or your comment out, but since we've had the pleasure of smiling face to face, I trust that you'll take my response in good spirits even if you patently disagree with me (which of course you have the right to do.) If l.t. b&h means you just hold through any market environment, I am no longer a ltb&h investor. This taught me a most unpleasant lesson that I don't want to relearn anytime soon. You're using 20/20 hindsight to determine how "easy" it was to see everything. That's not the case in real-time investing. I'm the first to acknowledge that there are lots of ways to make money. But when it comes to learning unpleasant lessons, I caution you and everyone else here that trying to time the market will likely provide many more mistakes to learn from than suffering the temporary setbacks such as what happened in 1998 and 2000. I spent the weekend joking with a friend that my portfolio is down 30% for the year. That's right: joking! This is a friend with whom I have a history of placing losing bets about the stock market. So this time I bet her that my portfolio was down more than hers. And I was so unconcerned over the long term about my portfolio that I was actually doing everything possible to make sure I'd won the bet. That's because I'm having FUN! Folks, long-term investing can be fun if you focus on the long term. This downturn has been a walk in the park for me. Not everyone has to share my thinking about that -- actually, not a person on the planet has to -- but for those of you who are trying to decide what the best strategy is, I'm happy to be a public example of the FUN of long-term buying and holding even in periods like this. That's because my portfolio is 28 times larger than it was at the beginning of 1990. Others might be smart and astute enough to enjoy that kind of performance by implementing all sorts of short-term strategies. But I'm neither that smart nor that astute. So if you're as challenged about short-term thinking as I am, consider long-term thinking that allows the market of the last three weeks to be like a walk in a park. If your goals are focused on the next few decades instead of the last few weeks it can be that much fun, I promise. --Mike Buckley