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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: im a survivor who wrote (7257)	10/11/2000 11:50:19 AM
From: Cactus Jack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Keith, I share your feelings, but still think we're close to the bottom. Do you own any EXTR? It is swimming against the current again today. jpgill

To: im a survivor who wrote (7257)	10/11/2000 11:55:27 AM
From: horsegirl48	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

you will get another chance to sell I promise, just watch the next couple of weeks. HG48

To: im a survivor who wrote (7257)	10/11/2000 12:09:07 PM
From: Percival 917	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 65232

Hi Keith, Remembering something my father used to say and that I have a hard time listening to, but we have to remember to look at these holdings of ours not on a daily basis or a weekly or monthly basis but more like yearly. If we have companies with good fundamentals and no new technology has come along that will displace our company's, then look at the long term and they will come back. It is just like that in business. Sure the receipts are down at this point or at that point, but how did you do for the year? I looked back at where I was this time last year and even though we have had 2 major Naz corrections I am still ahead of last year. To me that is all that matters. Yes, it would be nice to get out on top once in a while, but now to bail after all the damage has been done seems counterproductive to say the least. From here the upside looks more likely than further downside. BWITHDIK.<g> My biggest concern is how much these 2 reversals will make the average investor more gun shy than ever, about taking a plunge back into the stock market again. Later, Joel

To: im a survivor who wrote (7257)	10/11/2000 12:36:31 PM
From: StockHawk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

>>like an idiot, I still haven't sold a thing.<< If it is any comfort, you have a lot of company. Clearly much of the buying going on around here over the past few weeks has been wrong - at least in the short term. But I'll tell you something - the same factors that motivate people to buy near tops also motivates them to sell near bottoms. When something goes up we think, hey that's a great stock I should buy it. Later it goes up more and we think ‘I knew it". Finally when the evidence is so overwhelming, you jump, and the damn thing turns the other way. With very few exceptions, whenever I have sold near a top I have felt like an Idiot in the short term. Invariably, the stock would continue higher. And when I have bought near bottoms I have also felt like an Idiot, as the stock continued lower. But in the longer term these trades were usually my best. Now I'm not saying that staying the course is always the answer. Clearly someone owning tulip bulbs after the craze peaked in Holland did not do well by holding. And people who invested in money-losing dot com stocks that are now going out of business should have sold. But if you are in the kinds of stocks generally discussed here, QCOM, INTC, etc. it is almost inconceivable to think they will not recover. Consider this. What if I told you that my father was born on October 30, 1929 - one day after the crash. And that to celebrate my grandfather took $1000 and invested it in an index fund in my father's name. You think he felt like an Idiot afterwards as the market kept falling? You bet he did. Now consider how much that investment would be worth today (at today's low) if it had never been sold. My friend unclewest says that everyone wants to buy low and sell high, but most are just too scared to do the former. And I will add, too greedy to do the latter. The stock market is an efficient mechanism used to transfer wealth from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated. It's the unsophisticated who sell in panic near the bottoms. StockHawk