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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kayaker who wrote (110688)	1/10/2002 9:47:34 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 152472

i was 100% in value mutual funds the first half of the year and sold out around july. did fine, tank you. i have mentioned that many times. also, my thinking kind of changed over the course of the year, as i decided by summer the value stuff was overvalued along with the the, er, racier sectors of the market. it is true that in september much of the value stuff fell considerably below my selling prices (real estate stocks like hotels got whacked), but my thinking had changed considerably, so it may have been an apples to apples comparison, but the comparator was a different person. i believe it is important to have flexible thinking in the markets. i am always willing to throw my current philosophy in the trash if i find a better one. i was a serious bear in late 1998 (i bet you find that hard to believe -g-). i was surrounded by people who knew nothing about the markets, but were making tons of money. so i threw my bear hat in the trash can, and put all my money in qcom options in 99. it may not have been intellectually sound, but there were some portfolio benefits. then in 2000 i dumped qcom and got on the sdli boat. they still had a few bottles of booze back then for the taking. then that boat started sinking so i jumped off of it. landed on the value pontoon. had a nice free lunch. then jumped off the value boat in mid-01 and landed on a deserted island. started reading about the markets and portfolio theory, started thinking longer term. still evolving--anything can happen and it probably will. you confuse theory with reality. let's define our terms a bit. if there is a "theory" i subscribe to, it's the idea that the market is a weighing machine over time. there's also a reality described by that theory. however, the described reality takes a long time to unfold, so it appears different from the short-term "reality" that has convinced you that the Nasdaq can never revisit its September lows. Grantham's analogy is a very good one, and i've mentioned it before: imagine you're standing on top of a tall building and throw a bunch of feathers into the air. the wind takes them away to you know not where. you cannot know what their paths will be in advance--there are too many unpredictable short-term variables. but you know that eventually the feathers will land...somewhere, be it on the street below or in your back yard or in the next state. the gravity subtly weighing on those feathers is like the gravity of value weighing on risk assets. "The change would be very subtle....It might take ten years or so...."