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Technology Stocks : MRV Communications (MRVC) opinions? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sector Investor who wrote (23115)	8/18/2000 11:48:21 AM
From: Greg h2o	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

agree with you on the eights, but not the aces....also, largely depends on what the dealer is showing.

To: Sector Investor who wrote (23115)	8/18/2000 12:23:36 PM
From: kvkkc1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

Sector, I wouldn't knock buy and hold too hard. Although in MRVC's case it may have worked out, given the volatility, I am just wondering if your trading puts you in the 39.6% tax bracket? If so, this one worked out for you since they had a drop of about 75%, but who knew at the time? Good luck.knc

To: Sector Investor who wrote (23115)	8/18/2000 12:33:00 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42804

Ah man, Sector. I'm too busy correcting you -g- to even look at MRVC stock price. Regarding blackjack. I'm basically a craps player, but when I play blackjack I do split aces and eights. I play bj as a respite from craps, and I find myself unwilling to practice and work at card counting. Therefore, I use chart from "Zero Memory 4-deck Blackjack Strategy", an article which I clipped years ago from an issue of American Statistician. I'm comfortable with that because I see the research behind it, and I believe in the results of that research. Not that I claim to be a bj winner - sometimes I win, sometimes I lose- but that I believe for the work I am willing to do (memorize a chart), I am maximizing my chances for a favorable outcome. Perhaps the difference between us is this: You make your own analyses and decisions and are successful doing so. You follow your own path so-to-speak. I am more willing perhaps to follow others. Whereas you might consider that, if not a fool's way, a lazy or sloppy way. I like to believe I am making my own decisions also though. Even as I find I want to watch closely what successful investors are doing. So for example, I've liked GCI before Warren Buffett bought it. Now that he's bought I likely will be buying more. I hope to profit there just as I did with DNB and GMT which he bought. Closer to home, people attentive to Paul Klemencic's work on the Electronic Contract Manufacturer's thread have made good profits in almost any (if not all) of the companies discussed there. I do not have the profits you have in MRVC with any of my stocks. Nor, imo, do I deserve such profits. I wasn't aware of MRVC at 6 or 12, but I doubt I would have the confidence or conviction to have bought what for me would've been an overly large position. You would have a valid point by saying you were able to have that conviction (to buy such an amount) only because your superior research enabled you. I would counter by saying that that much research requires that your portfolio of stocks must be small - there's not time to research in detail (if that's what superior research is) so many companies. You ultimately close (or maybe win) the argument when you say, all you need is one good stock. I mumble something about too risky for me and go back and ask myself, am I meeting my financial goals? (seem to be), so I will stick to the ways I believe the experts are saying to invest. ------ Aside about Lynch. A commentator had a good comment about Lynch's famous "know what you own" point. He said that after Vinik, Fidelity tightened up on allowing its managers to talk with the public. So Fidelity made it darn difficult for the stock holders to "know what you own" at the very same time that they hired Lynch to do those Fidelity commercials.

To: Sector Investor who wrote (23115)	8/18/2000 3:19:38 PM
From: Robert G. Harrell	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 42804

2 cents worth:(On the morning discussion. Started this before lunch and got interrupted.) My investing experience has led me more to the Ockham's Razor perspective which is more or less "keep it simple stupid." I spend much of my time reading and researching about stocks but I don't try to sort out every nut and bolt in a company. If I can tell that it has the right products at the right prices in the right sector(s) and the market is verifying this with a growing relative strength, I'm probably going to do well investing in it. One of my first investments after I re-entered the market a few years ago was C-Cube. It apparently had the first item on my list right. It was the recognized leader in MPEG coding and decoding. I used to diligently read every post on the CUBE boards on AOL and then SI. The guys on the SI CUBE board posted everything written or even speculated about CUBE but they have consistently been so deep in the forest that they couldn't see what was actually happening in the real world. I doubt many of them have made money in CUBE unless they traded it frequently. There is such a thing as having too much "information." There are lots of boards on SI where the people endlessly argue the difference between tweedle dee and tweedle dum about a company and never put the information together in a useful format for making investment decisions. (One of the strengths of this board.) I have found that reading good books like The Roaring 2000sand publications like Investors Business Daily, The Gilder Report and now The Digital Power Report among others, help me to recognize good investment opportunities more than tearing apart 10-Ks and product specs. If I can make an analogy, let's think about visiting a gem mine. Suppose I have regularly read books about gems, subscribed to Gems Hunters Digest, regularly read the Prospecting for Gems board on SI, etc. Now suppose I go to a gem mine where they have buckets of stones from the mine all set out for you to buy. I look in a bucket and recognize a nugget of gold, 2 rubies and a sapphire poking out of the rocks. I also notice that guys from Fidelity Gems Co. and Janus Gems Co. have backed up their trucks and are loading up with buckets from this mine. I don't see the need to examine every rock in that bucket to know that at $70 I've probably got a good investment in that bucket of rocks. Similarly, having read about Terabeam in the Gilder Report and other places, I didn't need a degree in EE to recognize that Jolt was a real valuable gem. I also knew that all optical is the future of networking and have owned a JDSU rock that has appreciated greatly in recent years. It was pretty easy for me to see the combination of FOCI and other assets to form a company that could sell in the same space as JDSU as another valuable gem. I also knew that even though I don't really know what a triplexer is, that there is one for every 4 houses in the projects Marconi is doing for Bell South and others. Sounds like another valuable gem to me. I could go on, but I trust I've made my point. Just how many gems do you have to recognize in the MRVC bucket before it is a good buy? Cheers, Bob