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

To: tekboy who wrote (25606)	5/31/2000 6:48:00 AM
From: gdichaz	Respond to of 54805

tekboy: Condolences on your LEAPS call buying experience. As we have discussed before, my general approach to investing is to find what to buy and then just - buy it. (My major effort goes to selection of what to buy, not when or how - but that is just what I do) I have also found that over the years I have mishandled the buying process more by limit orders than market orders, so my current practice is to use market orders almost always - there are always exceptions. LEAPS may be one, although my experiment with buying those in 1997 was with market orders and I found to my amazement that the execution was OK in terms of price paid. Dangerous in general no doubt, but then as now, the trend of the underlying stock was difficult to determine and fluctuations significant. As I have suggested to you, luck is essential, brains useful. Wish you LUCK now. Best. Cha2

To: tekboy who wrote (25606)	5/31/2000 9:33:00 AM
From: mauser96	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Your experience with limit orders has happened to me too, so now I usually just watch, then place orders at the market. What would seem to be a significant price change on one time span (hourly) usually becomes insignificant on another time span (years). I shouldn't have said "start dollar averaging" since I've been doing it for a while. I was really talking to those who were still trying to time the exact bottom. My usual market approach is LTB&H with the majority of available funds. This nest egg remains in stocks no matter what. I usually have more cash than most members of this thread. When I get the feeling that stocks are very speculative, I start some dollar averaging selling. After stock prices have collapsed, I start some dollar average buying. Thus I'm almost always buying and selling both too early and too late. The times I am buying and selling tend to be periods of volatility, thus making dollar averaging work better. In other words I'm looking for extremes on either end. Buying is easier, because selling panics are due to fear, which is easier to recognize than greed. The amount of cash I hold is strictly a gut decision- literally whatever amount makes me sleep well at night. And no, I'm not always consistent. Since the rules of the market are always changing I'm not sure consistency is a virtue here. I try to keep Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote in mind: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" Dollar averaging can also give you bragging rights. "Yes, I was buying stocks right at the bottom" You don't have to mention that you were also buying them before and after the bottom... <<gg>> Mostly I rely on subjective evidence about market extremes, but Martin Zweig's book "Winning on Wall Street" has some very useful information about objectively identifying major change periods.

To: tekboy who wrote (25606)	5/31/2000 4:29:00 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

OT re LEAPs/limit orders/sensitivity/specificity: I usually place limit orders for stocks (and always for options), buying in increments. It can take me 6 months to slowly accumulate a position. I'll decide on a buy-in price, and then make purchases once a month, or every time the stock dips 10%, until I run out of cash or the stock gets above my buy-price. Sometimes, I'll sell the rallies, in an attempt to get a lower average cost on my shares. My eventual return is determined equally by a low buy-in price and a high selling price. I expect that, more than half the time, a stock will never reach my buy-price, and/or I won't be holding a full position as it runs up. That's OK, as long as the few I buy are at great prices. To put it in statistician's terms: my selection process (picking the stock and the buy-price) sacrifices sensitivity in order to achieve excellent specificity.

To: tekboy who wrote (25606)	5/31/2000 5:07:00 PM
From: lurqer	Respond to of 54805

O.T. Schwab website didn't have the new LEAPS symbols in the system yet I very rarely make spur of the moment decisions wrt options so I usually know what option(s) I may be interested in - one to several days before I make a transaction. I use Schwab for most of my transactions based on proven advantages of having a local office with which to deal in case any problems ensue. My experience is that frequently Schwab will not have a current database. So ahead of the time to place a real order I will attempt a putative order just to see what Schwab's online response will be. If the order goes through I merely cancel the confirmation. If the order cannot be processed, then I call my Schwab "team" with a list of symbols that I wish them to add to their database. Again my experience with this approach is that if I have only two or three symbols, they are in the database in less than 12 hours. If I give them five or more symbols I expect some "follow up" will be necessary. This approach has become sufficiently SOP for me that the "team members" know what to expect and no longer have to verify that the symbols are not in their database before they will act. Just one approach. Hanging around... lurqer