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

To: Larry S. who wrote (39979)	3/4/2001 7:37:10 PM
From: alanrs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

While it would be nice to have a list of 20 stocks in various sectors of the market to rotate into when the going gets tough, I don't find that to be particularly practical. When I first started investing I was very value conscious and owned drug companies and banks and utilities. These were the companies I followed. They were not bad investments-obviously some better than others. Over the years I found other companies I liked, for whatever reason, and slowly sold off the original investments to put the money to work in the new companies. I just recently sold the last of FWC and I still own a little INTC from those days. Over the last 2-3 years I have mostly invested in tech, with a reasonable investment in REITS I still hold (they seem to be negatively correlated to tech, at least so far) and a basket of oil drillers I recently finished selling off. The reason I'm telling you all of this is that I view investing as an ongoing process. I now follow about 20 tech companies in my own limited way, along with 6 REITS and a similar number of oil drillers. I know that now that I no longer have any money in oil, I will over time loose track of those companies. There are just so many hours in the day. Of course, if oil goes to $60/barrel suddenly I will probably do a little scrambling, but the reality is that by the time I would figure out where I was comfortable investing the game would be over. I hear the banks did well/are doing well this year. I used to own Bankers Trust and JP Morgan and Bank of America. I don't have a clue as to what their prospects are right now. I do hope the people invested in them do well. It is my belief that I will do better by paying attention to what I follow and buying when prices appear reasonable-by whatever valuation metric I'm using. My father rotates his money from sector to sector. He does it in sector funds in an IRA. He is reasonably good at it. He spends a lot of time identifying well managed funds (the old who's hot and who's not), leaving the fund manager to be an expert in the individual stocks. It's just a different mind set. Lots of things work.

To: Larry S. who wrote (39979)	3/4/2001 10:03:15 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I wasn't suggesting "timing" an investment for tax purposes. But if one decides to "time" for market rotations, the resultant reduction in investment capital shouldn't be ignored. >> My experience is that more money has been lost to avoid paying taxes than any potential tax liability. Long term capital gains are just a pleasant consequence of long term investing, not a reason for holding a stock if fundamentals are changing or if you have lost confidence in them. I might add that, during the great tech bull market of 1999, I saw many traders incur tax liabilities and lose opportunities for appreciation needlessly as they traded in and out of stocks that were moving relentlessly upwards. uf

To: Larry S. who wrote (39979)	3/4/2001 11:05:33 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Larry, My experience is that more money has been lost to avoid paying taxes than any potential tax liability. In other words, the investors made two decisions -- the first one not to sell a stock purely because of the tax liability and the second one to sell it later after the stock had really tanked. That's the kind of anecdotal information that can be misleading. More than likely, the second decision to sell after a huge loss was the really bad one. Had the investor let the investment ride in a dominating, successful company the likelihood is that the long-term investment would be handsome. If the company wasn't able to prosper over the long term, the first decision not to sell wasn't bad because it was an attempt to defer payment of taxes; instead, it was a bad decision because it didn't take into account the negative aspects of the company's fundamentals. --Mike Buckley