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Strategies & Market Trends : NetCurrents NTCS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (6300)	3/18/2001 6:00:07 PM
From: AllansAlias	Respond to of 8925

Don't know about weather, but the commercials on cotton are betting it does not break that floor at $50 on the continuous chart. -ng Helluvan ugly slide for it thus far though. Got momentum?

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (6300)	3/18/2001 6:20:53 PM
From: Andriy Turhovach	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8925

Cotton and weather patterns -- ugh!!! Been following yours and others prognostications. My tendency is to believe that there are still an awful lot of folks out there who have placed their heads very firmly in the sand and are refusing to accept the reality of the situation that is facing them. An interesting article in today's New York Times part of which I post below: There are signs of suffering in indicators like consumer confidence and purchases of consumer goods and capital goods, argued Peter J. Tanous, president of Lynx Investment Advisory Inc., a money management concern in Washington. "My sense is that the anguish that people are feeling, they are keeping to themselves because the losses are so big," he said. "Investors are internalizing the pain but it's being reflected in the economy. People are sitting on their hands and their wallets." Mr. Tanous, author of "Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth From the World's Best Money Managers," makes investor psychology something of a study. He fears that many investors are holding onto decimated stocks in the hopes that they will make a quick comeback, as some have in the past. A big mistake, in Mr. Tanous' view. And he provides a bit of arithmetic to demonstrate why. Take a popular stock like Intel, which has fallen 63 percent from its high of $75.81 in August. Many investors feel that Intel's dominance in microprocessors makes it a prime comeback candidate. Assume that Intel's shares rise 15 percent a year going forward, an enviable return by any investor's reckoning. How long would it take for the shares to get back to their high of just seven months ago? Seven long years. Plug in the same assumptions of 15 percent annual returns for the rest of the most popular shares in America and the picture is sobering indeed. These stocks may certainly come back, but if they do, it will more likely be over a period of years, not months. At 15 percent a year, Cisco shareholders would need to wait a decade for their stock to get back to its high of $82, seen last March. AT&T would climb back to its peak of last March in seven years. General Electric, which has lost a relatively modest 33 percent since its peak of last August, would need three years to return there. Microsoft would see $115 again in six years, while Oracle shareholders would have to wait nine years to regain their shares' peak. Nine years would also have to pass before Sun Microsystems stockholders would again see the stock's high of $64.66. Because it has fallen so precipitously in the past year, Yahoo would require even more patience from its stockholders: 20 years of 15 percent gains. This exercise is not meant to advise investors to dump these shares. Rather, Mr. Tanous wants to show how investors will have to temper their expectations and learn to be satisfied with the lower returns that are more typical of the stock market. While pundits and strategists quibble over whether the market has bottomed or has further to fall, Mr. Tanous said investors should instead bury any notion they may harbor that the bull market of the last decade will stir again. "I can state with a great degree of conviction that most of us will never see a decade in the market like the '90's in our lifetime again," Mr. Tanous said. "And until investors taper their expectations to more normalized returns, they're going to be in for trouble." On another matter, I thought I'd bring you up to date with regard to my experiences with TS Pro (yeah, I know, MSWIN and E-Signal is now the favorite). Its been running like a charm for me. Aside from the fact that they still don't offer futures, everything else about the program has more then met my expectations. Incidentally, the data feed has been rock solid as well (I'm really beginning to wonder if what some other poster has said about using S&P Comstock as an excuse for failure may not be true -- its performed flawlessly here). I recently upgraded my computer system (Dell Workstation w/ 1.5 GZ P4, 512 MB RAM, and YES -- finally WIN 2000!) What a difference! Also, before I'm banished for all the OT chatter <G> I'd like to thank you (I think) for suggesting Kaufman's book. Have gone through it twice so far and I have to admit, if I had any cobwebs in my brain for lack of intellectual stimulus, they are gone by now. Whew!!! -- quite a book. Thanks again. Regards, Bo PS -- You'll enjoy this. No sooner did I cancel my subscription with Q-Charts then they turned around and double-billed me! I filed a dispute with my CC company and yesterday received notice that my dispute had been resolved in my favor. Alleluja! I'm free at last...

To: Michael Watkins who wrote (6300)	3/18/2001 6:37:09 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8925

I know someone at Columbia Univ who's working with 2 profs on those weather pattern derivatives, I mean that is BIZARRE!!!! :-) 10 year bear, I don't even know what use it is for people to try and predict time periods. Nobody's ever right, and where does the exercise lead? Like you said, let's work with what's in front of us. Anyway: Bear markets have lasted, on average, about 13 months, according to Ned Davis Research. But they vary widely. The shortest bear market -- 45 days -- was in 1998 with the Nasdaq's brief slide. The longest outside the Great Depression: about 2 1/3 years, between late 1939 and early 1942. This bear market already is considered about a year old, even though stocks overall haven't been down 20% that long. Mellody Hobson, president of Chicago's Ariel Capital Management, notes that "there's no bottom to 'worse.'" Investors who rushed to Wall Street for the first time in the 1990s "are now showing some real fear," she says. Based on that, she doesn't think the turnaround will come quickly.