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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ild who wrote (89186)	2/3/2001 11:00:12 PM
From: BSGrinder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Solution to your problem: Open an account with Mike's new firm once he joins, and, voila, you can have him as your broker. /BSG

To: ild who wrote (89186)	2/4/2001 11:21:38 AM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 132070

ild, I think Bill Gross is a very smart guy. When I was running bond money, I considered him my top competition. Actually, at that time, my top competition was high rate Certificates of Deposit, but Bill was the top human competition. <g> I think he is definitely worth reading. As is Roach. As is Richebacher, Grant, and The Bank Credit Analyst. Liscio was always interesting, but he passed away this year. The problem with many of them is that it can be hard to translate economic commentary into useful investment ideas. Especially since some of it within the same source is as contradictory as possible. And I plead guilty to having participated in this sort of thing when I ran funds. In our semi-annual and annual fund reports, we always had an economic commentary followed by the portfolio manager's outlook. Our economist was very much a trend follower. At the top of rates, summer of 1984, the economic report sounded like only an idiot would be buying anything other than overnight repo agreements. Then, my part told folks how excited I was about being able to lock in 14% rates on Treasury bonds and how I hoped the fire sale would continue for awhile, but expected a huge bond bull market to break out at any moment. Ditto for when bond rates declined to 7 1/2% in late 1986. The economic part was very "constructive" on long bonds and I was commenting that I had lowered the portfolio's avg. maturity to 7 years and hoped to be at 3 before the crash started. The funny thing was, I never got a call from a selling broker or a client about these contradictions. I did get a call from my marketing Sr. V.P.s who told me that no way were they going to allow me to go to 3 years avg. maturity. But it shows how hard it can be to connect the dots between economic forecasts and investment action.