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To: John who wrote (165344)	5/12/2002 10:16:48 PM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	Respond to of 436258

thanks. true ZEAL in more ways than one.

To: John who wrote (165344)	5/13/2002 6:08:00 AM
From: robnhood	Respond to of 436258

That was good, I particularly liked the accolades to bears-- << Extreme daily bear market rallies of this record-breaking magnitude are almost exclusively caused by short covering. The fearless speculators who actively short the equity markets render several great and exceedingly important services for all investors. Every normal long-term buy-and-hold investor ought to really admire these shorting folks for the crucial role they play in counterbalancing dangerous market excesses that can lead to severe capital losses. A short-seller simply reverses the temporal order of the ancient core-investing mission of Buy Low Sell High. A short-seller borrows shares of a stock from a broker, sells them high in the open markets today, and hopes to buy them back low in the future to repay the loan and provide a profit on the speculative trade. This act of shorting, of betting against stocks, serves incredibly important functions for the general health and well-being of the financial markets in a couple major ways. First, like a pride of lions on the African savanna taking down a wounded wildebeest, short-sellers help cull the herd of investments so only the strong and healthy companies thrive to attract long-term investors? precious and scarce capital. Short-sellers take on potentially unlimited risk in placing their speculations, so they are generally very careful only to short companies that are either vastly overvalued in fundamental terms like Cisco Systems was in March 2000 or companies run by criminals and doomed to implode like Enron of late 2001. Without short-sellers, unhealthy companies would fester longer at inflated stock prices and normal long-term investors would lose vastly more capital from valuation-induced slides and Enron-type debacles without the lionhearted shorts carefully picking over the investment herd and taking aim at the dangerous and unhealthy corporate losers. Second, when the markets are falling fast, it is absolutely crucial that someone, somewhere, buy some stocks immediately to halt the freefall. Short-sellers are often the only source of consistent stock demand in times of extreme market weakness. As prices fall lower and lower the shorts become more and more tempted to buy back their borrowed stock to cover their short positions at a profit. If short-sellers didn?t exist market plunges would be much more catastrophic as crucial stock buying demand during severe market travails would simply evaporate.>>