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To: Earlie who wrote (124238)	9/20/2001 12:21:06 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

NEM performing like a champ today....

To: Earlie who wrote (124238)	9/20/2001 2:54:04 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Hi Earlie, I guess there has been overproduction of all sorts of goods and commodities around the world--from pajamas to memory chips to automobiles and so on. And a sudden unwillingness of hundreds of millions of people to spend money on these things would be as deflationary as what occurred within the U.S. in the 1930s. It sure is hard to think of all these things at once. Maybe twelve years ago I tried to write a computer program, in a "threaded language" called LISP, into which I put a lot of rules or probabilities, such as, "If profits go up, the stock market rises," or "If the dollar goes down, gold goes up." (both these can be debated, of course). Then I would feed in things like current interest rates, the price of gold, the rate of inflation, the level of the stock market, and so on. The program produced no consistent results of any predictive value. For a while I thought there was something wrong with the program. After a while I decided that the program was correct: it is impossible to predict the economic and financial future. Therefore, for me, the one great principle of investing is to recognize that we cannot know what is going to happen and we must try to be in a position to survive and possibly profit no matter what happens. I must admit that I totally failed to anticipate the stock market madness of 1997-2000 My energy stocks have certainly done very poorly lately, but Prudent Bear Fund has more than made up for that (in our IRAs). But gee oh gee, why did I have to go and sell my LEAP Dow Puts? Strike price 14,000? I wonder who is going to have to pay up on those things. Is there any possibility of default?