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Strategies & Market Trends : Guidance and Visibility -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SpinCity1 who wrote (61609)	7/22/2002 4:52:00 PM
From: SpinCity1	Respond to of 208838

short interest climbs 4.8 percent and the market drops what percent? there are some big profits being held in some margin accounts some place.

To: SpinCity1 who wrote (61609)	7/22/2002 4:55:10 PM
From: SpinCity1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 208838

Also on Monday, mutual fund data tracker Lipper Inc., a unit of Reuters Group PLC, estimated that investors pulled a net $13.8 billion out of stock funds in June, the first monthly outflow since September 2001, when jittery investors yanked $29.3 billion after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Still, the latest outflow is only a fraction of the estimated $3 trillion in stock fund assets overall -- meaning that most investors are staying in. But with stocks continuing to tumble, July is shaping up as another month of mutual fund outflows as more corporate blow-ups, weak corporate earnings reports and jitters over the economy have plagued the stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average, trading at levels last seen in 1998, fell nearly 8 percent last week alone. And since the Fourth of July holiday, about $1.5 trillion in investor wealth has been erased from the stock market, based on the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index. That's all combined to give beaten-up investors a gloomy view of the market, said Thomas Grzymala, a certified financial planner in Alexandria, Va. "What I'm hearing from people is, 'It's bad and it's going to stay that way,'" he said. "It's been a steady, Chinese water torture: drip, drip, drip. And 'please turn off the drip' is what I'm hearing." That's a big difference from investor reaction following the October 1987 stock crash, Grzymala said. Back then, "I heard people having faith that it would come back," he recalled. "They saw it happen rapidly, but they also felt that it could rapidly respond. But some experts say battered investor confidence is exactly what the market needs before the bear market will be over. Just when everyone is ready to throw in the towel, they say, is when stocks will be poised for a true rebound. These pundits say, however, that even though investor confidence has been hit, many people are in fact still too optimistic about the market, which means that a turnaround likely won't be imminent. For example, the UBS/Gallup survey shows about 20 percent of investors polled believe the Dow -- floundering near the 8,000-point level after a steep drop this year -- will climb back to the 11,000 mark within the next year. That would mean a nearly 40 percent surge in the blue-chip market gauge at a time when many strategists still believe fundamentals are weak, such as the outlook for corporate earnings growth. "You've got a foundation of investors who are going to remain steadfastly bullish, simply because they don't want to be left behind" if the market does turn, said Chris Johnson, managing quantitative analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research. And some investors, despite the din of bad news around them, said they aren't concerned about the declines and are sticking in the market while others flail. Robert Torrens, a retired government worker in Catlett, Va., said he has suffered large declines on his mutual fund and stock investments but he remains fully invested. The losses are natural after the late 1990s stock bubble, Torrens said, predicting the market will begin to rally by Labor Day as the market begins to "climb that wall of worry." The market likely won't recover all of its losses anytime soon, "but yeah, sure, in my lifetime" it will, the 67-year-old Torrens forecast.