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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chomolungma who wrote (173136)	2/26/2003 6:05:55 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Hi chomolungma, RE: "Have you had much success with this short term, event timing investment style in the past?" Well, there was that purchase of Intc at $58. RE: "What if the opposite happens and INTC rallies on the war news like in the first Gulf War?" I'll be happy the overall portfolio is up. RE: "Will you buy it back at higher prices?" My overall strategy is: hold stock long and also write cov calls on say 10% to 35%. Just like Willcousa, Paul & Elmer do. Cov calls means one can take advantage of a downturn and it reduces valuation issues. Have generated premiums thru writing cov calls and applied those to buying more shares (in a variety of stocks) and basically have 2.5X's the number of shares as the peak purely through writing covered calls, which means when this goes back up, the huge pain of this downturn may have been worth it. But it sure doesn't feel that way right now - my portfolio is down by quite a bit from the peak. I don't use leaps as a tool to grow the portfolio - I tend to use them for spending or if the valuation looks reasonable or if it appears there's been some over reaction (Iraq, etc.) or a turn around may be in sight by say 6 months to a year (which is what I currently believe) or I read something in the newspaper that either encouraged me or scared me off - leaps are a little more emotional and are highly risky so I only buy a very, very tiny amount - tiny enough that if I lose all of it (which can & has happened) I don't care. When I need to buy something outside of normal daily expenses, I use leaps to try to make this happen. I drove around with a dilapitated, old car until my (honest) auto mechanic strongly told me to get a new car, it was that bad. But spending any money out of my portfolio simply scares me so I try not to (studies show that women tend to equate money with security, and that's definitely true in my case). I won't take on debt to buy a car (debt scares me), I can't write out a check for a car off of my salary (and there's no such thing as bonuses), and it would scare me to spend any of the small savings from my salary, so that only leaves me with leaps to do so. I finally took up his advice when a leap came through. If the leaps generate a profit, I buy otherwise I don't & wait until another another leap gets me there. In this case, I want to generate some profits from leaps so I can invest into my startup and also another startup I bumped into, with a loose goal to do so by Sept. I'm feeling strongly about investing, so unfortunately that's having the opposite effect and making me gun shy in holding the leap, so I'll probably go in and out a lot - and anything small might scare me off for a short period of time. In this case, there was an article about Blair (last Thursday night) and after reading it I felt there's no way we're going to avoid war, and then I also read that Barrett made a comment about "industry can only go up" and that (believe it or not) made me think, last time he said something like that he was wrong, hard to forget that one, though, at least, now I don't automatically think ceo's are right like I used to, so it actually was a useful lesson to learn. I think we're heading out of this downturn (finally). But leaps have intra-week or intra-month sensitivities, so the short answer is, I may go in and out. Regards, Amy J