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

To: Jill who wrote (23590)	4/26/2000 10:42:00 AM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 54805

I'm afraid I have disagree with you, Jill. Options work very well in uni-directional markets, but options traders require an extraordinary amount of skill and focus in mixed markets to just to survive. In contrast, long term stock holders will (hopefully) be able to look at the carnage of the last few weeks as uncomfortable "bumps in the road", that caused no permanent injury. >> Frank posted somewhere, maybe on QCOM?, that he'd re-allocated his portfolio, selling his QCOM to turn it into DIM leaps, freeing up more cash while controlling the same amount of shares. I thought that was a smart move. We'll see how smart it was down the road. LEAPS require very little timing skill, which is why I employ them to a limited degree, but I'm painfully aware that the leverage they offer works in both directions. For the record, I only converted a portion of my qcom holdings to LEAPS earlier this year, and still retain most of my qcom investment in the form of common stock. Everything I've read, observed, and experienced leads me to agree with Mike that options trading is an extremely high risk investing approach best left to serious students of that discipline. uf

To: Jill who wrote (23590)	4/26/2000 10:46:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Jill, Geez, I don't think that's true. If you're referring to my comment that most options expire worthless, I could be wrong but I think it is true. That's not a huge criticism of options. It was made in the context of deflating tekboy's thinking that his 96% loss is a record. :) All options are either exercised or expire worthless. I'm the farthest thing from an expert on options but my understanding is that more expire than get exercised. When you mention that you're up over 200% compared to a year ago because of options, I've also gotta think that selection of the underlying stocks have more than a lot to do with your success. I keep track of my portfolio only on an annual basis so I don't know how it's done in the last 12 months. For those who might see your post and think options are needed to have tremendous accomplishments, my portfolio is up approximately 230% in less than 16 months. I purchased Qualcomm LEAPS only once. Their expiration date was the farthest available and their value constituted a mere 7% of my portfolio at the time of the purchase. I'd be willing to bet there are other portfolios owned by the folder participants that have outperformed mine also without using the time required to monitor and decide upon options tactics. --Mike Buckley