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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (48772)	10/2/2002 12:31:02 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

4 years is long enough for most shares to be traded, consequently the majority of those profits were not merely paper profits, but were taken out of the market (and either spent or possibly reinvested). That's an unwarranted conclusion. Many shares traded, but what percentage of the float did the traded shares represent, and what is the real cost basis of all shares traded and outstanding, those are the figures you need. Particularly in the case of a parabolic dotcom stock, most of the shares were probably purchased as options with a basis of pennies a share, yet since market cap marks the whole float to market, the market 'loss' on the shares is calculated from the market cap at maximum price, even though probably 80% of shares never traded at a price above 10% of the maximum. If you have a stock like Microsoft that spent a long time at a high price, then dropped substantially, the figures may be different. There's huge numbers of people out there with huge losses in these stocks Sure there are losses. Just nothing like 8 trillion dollars.