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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Icebrg who wrote (8635)	6/5/2003 6:55:12 PM
From: Biomaven	Respond to of 52153

sell after a share has lost x (perhaps 5 or 10 depending on preferences) percent from its most recent high Sounds good in theory, but in practice you can easily get whipsawed. Mechanical stop-loss rules like this just don't work well in practice. That's why I prefer the overall portfolio cap method - forces me to actually decide what to sell. Incredible as it would have seemed just a few months ago, I'm already running into tax issues this year as most of my tax loss shares are already gone and I had the big forced gain with SCIO. If we continue to climb, I'll at least do what I should have done in 2001 - sell some distant (expiring next year) in-the-money covered calls on some of my holding. That way if the stocks go up more I can take a loss on the call this year, and if the stock instead goes down I have some insurance but don't collect the gain on the call until next year. (But watch the complex tax rules on covered calls, though). Peter