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

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (42275)	4/30/2001 2:08:37 AM
From: Dinesh	Respond to of 54805

I imagine both - valuation and business understanding - is hard enough each by itself. Nonetheless, to make a great investment one requires an firm grasp on both counts: one alone is seldom sufficient as we have witnessed in case after case during the last few quarters. You could of course argue that this was a once in a blue moon kind of market but that's hardly a consolation to the poor soul who lost a big part of his or her investment. It's hard to say which one is more important. But surely ignore either and doom is kinda guaranteed sooner or later. At least, such has been my experience. And, in hindsight, the things that I failed to look up - wouldn't have taken more than a jiffy :-( No, I don't mean to imply that the such analysis can be done in mere minutes - only that I had been such a fool to miss the very basic ones! Perhaps those of us more left-brained can be kind enough and help show where to begin and how to drill down, and how far is reasonable. Re. the impact of missing merely the big days. $10,000 in 1950 in S&P would become something like 15,000 by end-2000. (w/o counting the dividend. The series can be downloaded from yahoo.) So, there is indeed such a thing as market timing, but I don't quite know how to use it favorably. Regards Dinesh

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (42275)	4/30/2001 10:06:48 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Thomas, Numbers may be daunting to some folks, but frankly this doesn't hold a candle to the difficulty of really understanding a company, product, market, and competitors which is the hear of GG. I think that's misleading. Having a spreadsheet that does all the calculations for a person is no help whatsoever. It's understanding all the ramifications of the numbers that is every bit as difficult as understanding a company and the so-called subjective stuff. That's because understanding the numbers is also rooted in subjective issues, as my previous post mentioned. As an example. understanding all the factors that affect a PEG is crutical to having an understanding of the extent to the probablity that a PEG might be on the low or the high side. Mike Buckley