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Strategies & Market Trends : Z PORTFOLIO -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DanZ who wrote (7543)	6/5/2002 12:44:37 AM
From: Kelvin Taylor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

"The problem that I see is you don't have a crystal ball, and don't know if a stock down 30% will recover in the near term." Tell me Dan what will it take for a stock down 30% to recover in the next 3-6 months? Please be specific. I would wager it WILL not do so. Therefore you will be hold money that could be used more usefully elsewhere. "I don't know what the point of your summary was yesterday." My point was two people have invested over half the Z port $$$ yet have not used any displince in using stops to protect the principle and/or keep losses manageable. The numbers speak for themselves. "It ignores gains and losses on closed positions, which as of yesterday stood at a net gain of $62,630. What if I had sold everything the day before you posted the summary?" Sure net gain on closed positions but what about the losses of the OPEN positions? They FAR exceed the cap gains. "The profit outlook for companies is only one factor that drives stock prices, and in fact, it isn't even the most prevalent factor in the short term." Why do you think ORCL and CSCO and so many other stocks have fallen? Profit warnings Dan. Companies that were making a profit have failed to do so and the outlook has not been favorable at all. "You can count on it, and I'm not selling anything until some rationality returns to the market and prices recover somewhat." Prices recover? Does that mean a stock down 50% recovers 25% that’s the sell target? How much does a stock need to rise if the price is down say 80% from where it was purchased? The attitude prices are too low to sell is wrong. The are low for a reason and what type market will be need for a stock now in the low SDs to return above 10? "Granted many of our positions are way down and in hindsight we should have sold them a long time ago." Yes and why didn’t you? You had the same opinion then. Didn’t make sense to take a 10% loss. Then 20% then 50%. Many here besides me ask that very question and you chose to ignore it. As I recall you said the "bottom is near" "But like I said before, if we had sold them, chances are we would have bought them back again at a higher price than they now trade. We could have saved a little, but I doubt if it would have made a big difference." Wrong! They could have been bot back at MUCH lower prices. And instead of being down so much you would have been in a position to have invested less money with perhaps lower risk at current prices(at least in stocks like CSCO) "You ask why hold on to a losing position? Because a losing position can turn into a winning position just like a new position." True, but for how long? Years? Doesn’t make sense to me and the others here for 2 people to control a large portion of the money only to have huge losses. That’s the facts like it or not. Why can't you say I made a mistake and move on. We all have done that at some point in time. We can do better. "By the way, several stocks that I follow made key reversals today. This means that they made a 52 week low and closed higher on the day. Here's a list of ones in the Z port that made key reversals today: CIEN, GLW, INTV, JDSU, NUAN, and ORCL." Stocks down so much will need much more than a one-day bounce to recover. Just count the number of failed rallies over the past 2 years and you will see. Dan, this has been a very direct and matter of fact discussion here. I’m glad we can have an honest exchange on the facts and differing opinions. I would have long sold those stocks before the losses got out of hand. Just remember it takes many more gains to make up for just a couple of huge losses. And if the purpose of this Z port is to trade for profits then something has to change, IMO.

To: DanZ who wrote (7543)	6/5/2002 7:48:39 AM
From: Ron McKinnon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

I think it is just great that we can have this kind of a discussion even if many of the comments are hard to take without nasty personal attacks like one sees on so many threads comments from "both sides" make a lot of sense but overall the trades done here of late have not been positive many of the stocks in this portfolio are decent companies that will recover over 6 months to 3 years and it does make sense to have a small % of the equity in them; maybe 2-5%, but not 5-10% and lets be honest, some are just dogs that make ne sense to hold at all other than as a pure crap shoot my comments: anad ok to hold small, sell half aol ditto, I sold my half yesterday aye fine but lighten up sell 500 ba ok cien ok, maybe, but will take a looong time to get back even cnc sell half cpn ok csco ok glw same as cien gnss ok gumm this was bought about three years ago in the low teens? seems ok but why not swing trade it instead of holding and tying up 10% of funds? intv a dog but fine as a 1% spec play jdsu same as glw and cien but but $100k is way too big a bet km in bankruptcy; a waste of investment; if one can't admit this was a huge mistake and dump it all then at least cut to 10k shares, hold it for 5 years, and pray len after a monster 2 year run the sector topped; real hard to say if it will recover to new highs; a stop is needed luv ok nuan cut to 4000 shares max orcl same as cien glw jdsu sell half pmtr see km qqq ok rei put in 2 stops, half each, to protect the great gains soss an ok spec bet spwx sell 2000, hold 1000 for a few years on spec tfs ok with a hard stop an overview comment, there is $220k in basically the same stuff, ie, cien csco glw jdsu orcl; that's about 20-25% of the portfolio I would bet that the performance of the QQQ or any one of many sector funds or a "holder product" will mirror that basket of stocks with at least a 80-90% correlation which would be a somewhat safer bet and a lot easier to monitor and swing trade