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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (40808)	11/4/2003 1:22:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, you performed a service for me, you didn't extract wealth from me. I prefer not to have volatility because when I think the share price overcooked, I want to get out of the kitchen. But the capital gains taxes in NZ mean I have to stay the course and watch the roller coaster while I wait for dividends to roll in. You made a certain number of dollars, which were precisely as many, less brokerage, as your counterparties lost. Like Shrodinger's Cat, my QCOM shares only have a share price when I open the box and inspect it. QCOM is only dead or alive when inspected. There is no gravitational energy you can extract by flying nearby. The value of QCOM is unaffected by whatever happens inside the QCOM cat box. The cosmos surrounding the box is what creates the value of the contents of the box. The relative value of the madmen inside the box, buying and selling to each other, be they puts, calls, in or out of money, in future or present or contracted in some other way is irrelevant to the externality of the QCOM world, where the real action takes place. One day, I might decide to enter the box myself and accept an offer for my shares. At that time, I will indeed be gaining or losing to your kind self, assuming you are the counterparty, relative to where the price subsequently moves. But until then, the numbers in the box are just estimates by you and your counterparties of the value of the cosmos outside your box. I'm interested in that external world, where revenue is earned, taxes paid, profits made and dividends delivered. It's true that a random nuclear event could blow the box to smithereens. I expect that such a random nuclear event would kill a lot more than the cats in the box and will in fact blow up the external world too. TeoTwawki. But by then, we'll have the Second Coming, which promises to be more fun than Uncle Al, KBE, with a $ pixelator. I don't plan on waiting around for that. Nor do I intend climbing a mountain to wait. Nor shall I don Nike clothing to fly to Hale Bopp's spaceship. Nor shall I buy Aztec totems and chant ancient incantations. You flying by my Tonka Truck doesn't extract energy or momentum or money from it. It's not a gravitational effect, where you leverage a risk I'm carrying. If I might be forced to sell, you would be right. Debt is in that sense a black hole generator, into which one can fall if passing beyond the event horizon into margin call collapse. But in the absence of me having debt, you extract no risk premium from me and can't gain momentum from the share price swinging close to my event horizon. Because I don't have one. Now. Your TeoTwawki idea is that so much debt swishing around the world means we are already inside the global event horizon. Maybe. That's another deal altogether. We are all inside one great big Shrodinger Box, with actual, real, nuclear events quite possible and MIRVs by the thousand already loaded, aimed and ready to fire. I will be surprised if there is not another nuclear war in my time. They are made to be used and humans tend to use what they've made if they get a chance. Lt General Boykin would perhaps think his idol could use some help. The Pakistanis might think their idol needs some help against Vishnu. The north Koreans might defend themselves with a pre-emptive strike as suggested and planned by the USA in their new theories on peaceful planets. Mqurice