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

To: marginmike who wrote (123665)	8/30/2002 1:01:45 PM
From: HairBall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

marginmike: Howdy, and once again thanks for coming to my defense. It seems folks that don't know how to use TA properly, just assume TA doesn't work. Hey, that's ok with me. TA has been very good to me…gg I don't think TA should be used in a vacuum, but it certainly provides a good guide when use correctly. Not infallible of course, but well worth the effort. I intended to be off early to enjoy a long weekend, but I am stalled waiting for a building inspector who is running late this AM. Have a great holiday weekend... Regards, LG PS: I actually made more money than I lost on WCOM after the initial recommendation. However, I admit I was not expecting the melt down that followed.

To: marginmike who wrote (123665)	8/30/2002 3:54:12 PM
From: limtex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

mm - here comes September and it looks like it wants to eat peoples net worth. If anything the business climate seems to be deteriorating by the day. Those numbers from Radio Shack in August look foreboding and the last time RS had bead news it sent Q from $63 to $40 in a few short weeks. Now with Sunw saying that things are if anything geting worse I'm beggining to think that you might actually get the 10% unemployent you forecast last year. AS for Qcom however well it does is almost but not totally irrelevant. It is a hedge fund shorting favorite and gets sunk in the slightest breeze and yet it is one of the safest bets around certainly in tech. My guess is that we get that old sinking feeling again till $23 -$24 sometime during Sept. Then a nicely timed downgrade or two to whack it down further, then Dr Jacobs issues a doing OK statement, ....back to $25 - $26 and so on till the results. Then some analyst doesn't like something and he gets 'concerns' about growth in the US China ( which we never coutned on two years ago) or Europe and the stock sinks back to a new range of $25 - $28 to await the Dec qtr. Maybe the economy will return one day but right now looks to me like its headed the other way and acclerating. Roll on Nov 04. Best, L

To: marginmike who wrote (123665)	9/2/2002 4:59:52 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Again with due respect I was up double digits last year and this year am up 6-8%(so far). i have had similar results these past two years. however, i attribute this not to skill but to lucky asset allocation. specifically, last year i was 100% value stocks for the first half of the year. this was a good time for value stocks. then i went to cash around late july, so i had the luck of missing the 9/11 swoon. however, i also had the unluck of not investing in the late september lows (in light of this unluck, i forced myself to buy the july 23 close this year to good effect). this year i have been heavily in bonds, especially TIPS, which have done well and vastly outperformed equities. here you have an asset class that started the year with a 3.5% real coupon, and yet it has managed a 12-13% positive return after 8 months, whereas equities have managed a 20% loss. an outperformance versus equities of some 3300 basis points. that is pretty radical given that equities have outperformed Treasurys by 500 bp on average since 1926. so i doubt being overweight bonds as i still am is a recipe for great outperformance going forward (barring a total meltdown). but these are strange times. JGB holders from the early 90s have consistently outperformed their equity markets for a decade now, so perhaps that is in store for us as well. but my point, w/r/t myself, is that i do not consider the results of the immediate past to be any sort of guarantee of outperformance going forward. We only need to be right 60% of the time and limit losses to make money. if it were that easy to beat the system, there'd be no casinos in Las Vegas. one has to remember that a certain percentage of investors will outperform even in a random distribution of returns. just like somebody will win $70 million in the lottery. the person who wins may claim they have a system or something, but really they just won the lottery. the fact remains that the expected return for a given lottery ticket is around minus 50 percent. and the expected real return on the SPX (as i see it) is around 2-4%, depending on which assumptions one makes. certain people will trade in and out of the market and do well, but others will not. people may have a "system" which they believe will give them a 60% chance of success, but that probability is based on assumptions, which ultimately rely on a normal distribution of outcomes that does not exist in a reflexive system such as the stock market. it was reliance on just such a system that led to the blowup of LTCM (and they had much more brains, money and connections backing their system than any daytrader). if they couldn't beat the system, why should an individual be able to? the reason people usually come up with is that they've beaten it in the past. but the problem is their sample is too small. meaning they haven't been in the game long enough to say decisively whether their results were due to luck or skill. think of it like this: if somebody gets a hit in their first at-bat in MLB, they are batting 1000. even if they strike out in their next AB, they are still batting .500. that is way better than Ted Williams ever did. but would we say that this rookie is the greatest hitter of all time? no way. his sample is too small. it's the same way with investors. they've been beating the market one year, or five years, or even 25 years. but this is like somebody with 25 at-bats and a .500 average. we would still not call him Ted Williams. baseball is an example of a human endeavor where we can say that skill exists, in a statistically significant sense. investing is no such area. somebody who bats 1000 in year one can go 0 for 5 in year 2. just ask George Gilder. all imo, and notwithstanding that, i wish you the best of luck in continuing to beat the market.