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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (22975)	4/17/2000 11:14:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

Dealing with Volatility I had a conversation with Dr Id today. (No, I wasn't lying down.) In that conversation I blurted out something which I later realized explains a lot about my nonchalant attitude toward extreme volatility in my buy-and-hold approach to the market. I mentioned that the reason being down 45% in 1998 and being down 30% this year (until today) truly was of no concern to me probably because I've been a salesperson most of my career. Salespeople often have no idea where the next commission will come from or how large it will be. Thinking about it later, I realized that most careers don't offer so many questions about expected income. I also came to realize that I've had 25 years' experience of not knowing what my annual earnings would be, whether the year would be one of filet mignon and fine wine or hot dogs and soda. Perhaps the nature of my career has prepared me for the ups and downs of the market in ways I never fully appreciated until today. Coming to that realization brought me to appreciate the corollary -- that the angst people understandably experience in dealing with those ups and downs might be because the unknown aspect of volatility is contrary to everything else in life most of us experience. All of that leads up to the need for me to apologize to all if I have been insensitive to the angst some have experienced. The tech stocks certainly have been extremely volatile, far more so than the norm. The anxiety that comes with that volatility is more than understandable. So for those of you who have a tough time dealing emotionally with volatility, I'll make a deal with you. Since I believe that increased volatility over the coming years is something we will all have to live with regardless of how well we intuitively deal with it, my part of the deal is that I'll do my best to remember that some of us understandably deal with it less well than others of us and need a lot of support. Your part of the deal, should you accept, is that you will do your best to focus on the facts that might help you get through the volatility with far less angst. Fair 'nuff? As one example of that sort of data, it's not unimportant to me that the four very most volatile days my portfolio has ever experienced occured very recently, between December 29 and today. There were two up days and two down days. The two best up days exceeded the two worst down days by 16%. It won't always work out that way, but the anecdotal evidence shouldn't be entirely ignored. --Mike Buckley