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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (45712)	2/6/2004 9:17:40 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, Doomsters like yourself, have proven to us that if you are smart enough you could make money in any type of market whether it?s going up or when it's going down. You people can go long as well as short. The trend does not really matter. For people like me, the trend does not really matter either. I could be right about the trend and still lose all my money ? my pockets are not deep enough to ride out the truly unexpected. Basically, you can always expect the unexpected. For me I like to keep things simple. I like to keep a positive outlook. I like to look for a positive trend that I can believe in and then find a positive story that I hope can hold up. Ideally I would like to believe in the people behind the story. In the past my biggest success have been with Coca Cola and Intel. With Coca Cola, I drank the stuff almost every day. I went to shareholders meetings and was truly impressed with then CEO Roberto Guisueta (sp? I never could get it because I could never pronounce it). There was no chance that investment was going to fail as they went global and as Roberto guided earnings expectations. When I heard rumors Roberto was in the hospital, I started unloading all my shares and got out completely shortly after he died. WRT Intel, I was not enamored with Andy Grove's style, but Gordon Moore was one of my technology heroes. I truly believed in the microprocessor. When I was into it, I thought I knew more about their ASP, competition, margins, and sales forecast than their CFO. The irony is that Andy Grove did far better for me than Craig Barrett whose personality better suited my investment style. More recently, I bought the story on storage. I bought Iomega before BG went on the Internet. My 400 shares turn into thousands of shares, even as I sold along the way to lock in profits and even though I thought their CEO was a clown. The next story I bought into was DSL (ADSL as it was known then) as I struggled with my 28k modem even though I started out with a 300 baud modem. I was disappointed at the time with my AMATI investment when it turned into only a four bagger as the founders (Standford professors) sold out. I was ready to pull the trigger on an invest in Qualcomm when an article appeared in Barron's sometime in 1995, I believe, where the author stated quite convincingly that CDMA was a fraud. I watched QUAL climb to the stratosphere and I was never able to find an entry point to get into that investment. Since then I have more or less nibbled at story stocks and for the most part been remarkably lucky (pure luck). I even had a few shares of Enron (without any conviction) and sold it at 79 making a few dollars. I am now trolling for the next big story. I like the China story ? but I hate it if it means that for China to succeed we would have to fail. That is not the type of invest that I could go for. I like Herman Kahn?s forecast that we are in for a major economic boom because of what technology is going to do for us. I am buying that story. It is something I could really believe in. It is something I believe is happening right now. We are in the eye of the storm , but it is difficult to see. Even more difficult is to see who the real big winners are going to be. Unlike you, I do not believe the Chinese think (the ones that really think) they can do it alone. They can do it best with help from the US. It is true as you say people have been earning a living arbitraging (or whatever you call it) gold and hedging against Armageddon for maybe several thousands of years. But, heck, that's no fun, at least for me. Mary