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Strategies & Market Trends : 1998 Magic 25 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bundashus who wrote (43)	12/9/1997 8:56:00 PM
From: Trippi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116

bundashus -- my advice (take it with a grain of salt) would be not to invest in every stock on the list -- Last year there were some real dogs -- URMD and The Phycicans Computer network were among them -- if you avoid this year's dogs -- and believe me there will be some -- you will stand a much better chance of reaching 50% to 100% gains. If you buy $1000 of Lucent you would only be able to buy 12 shares -- so I would use that as a criteria for knocking LU off your list. I would try to cut the Magic 25 down to your own BUNDASHUS 5 -- look at the stocks with the biggest upside potential. VINF is under $4 with an ii price target of $8 to $12 EVSNF is at $11 and change with a target of $21. CNG has a lower number of shares outstanding and a smaller float -- this means it will be harder for institutions to aquire the shares -- but any increase on the demand for shares (any strong News etc) should move the stock much quicker than a Lucent for example. The key is to keep yourself diversified in 4 to 6 of these companies and really follow them. A basket of all 25 will do well -- but if you have the time to follow a small group of these stocks you will do much, much better -- ii can get it wrong but when they have picked a stock at 4 with a target of 8 to 12 -- if they are wrong and the stock gets to only 6 you still made 50% on your money -- of course if they are right -- you did much better. Often ii doesn't fully investigate competing technology or competitors -- they picked PCN last year -- but PCN was outmanuvered by MMGR -- guess who's on this years list? MMGR. This year they have a stock (I forget which one) that tests meat for e-coli -- sounds great the company will make millions selling machines to Burger King and IBP (Iowa beef packing) right? They may have missed the fact that the FDA recently OK'd irradiation as a safe way to kill e-coli during meat processing -- will companies flock to the irradiation technology and kill all e-coli at the processing plant -- or will companies like Burger King buy a tester that tells them if e-coli is present? I don't have the answer to that question -- but I'm not sure ii even considered it. In anycase I'm staying away from that stock until I find out more. My point -- take the list -- do your own due diligence and then go with a small group you believe in -- to spread your risk but harvest big gains -- ii's list is a great starting point but do not do the whole group. One other note -- I would look through SI and see which of these stocks have threads -- and on a close call I would go with a stock that has a group of people here following it -- you'll have more fun. And the odds are the thread will quickly move ahead of ii in terms of understanding the company and projecting earnings -- ii has been terrible on follow up info -- talk to anyone on the THQ thread on that one. Trippi

To: bundashus who wrote (43)	12/9/1997 10:02:00 PM
From: Cornstock	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116

I'd do DD on them before I bought any. Just because they are on the magic 25 list does mean that they will go up. Matter of fact 20 out of the 25 went down today. Some significantly. I think yesterday they increased about 2500 (as a group) Today, that increase is only $800.00. I'll post them once a week if you would like as I have them profiled. If you want me to send you the stock profile you can e-mail me and I will sent them to you.

To: bundashus who wrote (43)	12/10/1997 8:34:00 AM
From: Loren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116

Bundashus - Others might disagree, but I would not buy equal shares in a portfolio... there's really no logical basis to that. If you want to invest in the portfolio buy-and-hold style, I would do the following steps (some have been suggested already). a. As someone said, do due diligence. Study the companies some. Decide for yourself what risk level you are willing to live at. Do you want to hold stocks of companies that aren't making money yet? Do you want to hold stocks of companies that have P/E ratios much higher than their annual earnings growth rate? You need to ponder these types of questions. Throw out the stocks that don't meet your criteria. b. Try to pare the list down to about 8 stocks. Unless you have a lot more free time than most of us do, you can't really keep up with more than about this many. If you have problems deciding which ones to throw out, find some objective criteria (either growth rates, or price/sales, or something), and cut the list. c. Buy based on equal $$, not shares. Of course, it doesn't have to be exactly equal... you may want to round to the nearest 10, or 25, or 100 shares, depending on your level of capital. d. Watch the stocks... immediately sell any of these that drop 20% from where you bought them or 20% from the highest close after the buy. Some may disagree with this one, but I maintain that a 20% drop in almost all cases is beyond normal variability, and signals to you that the stock is sick. Keep in mind this is not what I do, because I add technical analysis to the equation and trade more often, but if I wanted to buy and hold, this would be my approach. Loren