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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (38546)	10/19/2000 5:40:30 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

After today's action, it appears that the street finally received the message. NOK told them that Wireless is growing just fine, thank you very much. MSFT told them that PCs are growing just fine, thank you very much. And next week, NT will tell the street that Communications growth is absolutely spectacular, thank you very much. With the chip sector firing on all sectors, how many more messages do the shorts need before feeling the squeeze? <vbg> Ian.

To: Ian@SI who wrote (38546)	10/19/2000 8:45:17 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Ian, <with all the time I spend monitoring this stuff, I may as well go for a few extra bucks> As much as I would like to "buy and hold", the combination of volatility, liquidity, low transaction costs, real-time price availability and, I suppose, adrenaline, conspire to induce me to trade frequently. I really don't think that anyone can watch price fluctuations closely and avoid the temptation to trade. Why else monitor it so closely? Because it is so easy? I once read that Warren Buffett refused to keep a Quotron in his office because he found price fluctuations were too distracting. I don't know if his behavior has changed with the advent of the net, but I doubt it. Within a normal year I think it is easy for assets to sway in a wide band of about 30% of fair value on both the upside and the downside. Securities valuation is obviously an art rather than a science, as the analysts demonstrate to us every day. As long as prices are not randomly distributed, there will be a temptation to trade. In spite of the minutae of daily news concerning orders and sales of esoteric machinery that this thread loves to focus upon, it appears to me that stock prices of AMAT and most other companies in its industry are explained better on the basis of simple serial correlation than any other factor. Perhaps it is because of this momentum factor that we routinely swing from excessive undervaluation (where I believe we were only this morning) to excessive overvaluation (where we may well be in only 5 months). The only true buy and hold investor I ever knew was my father. He collected stocks the way a young boy goes about collecting stamps. But this was in the years that preceded the "information age". I don't know if he could have managed to maintain such a style of investing with the distracting array of tools we take so much for granted today. Sam