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Strategies & Market Trends : From the Trading Desk -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Green who wrote (2263)	1/9/1998 9:23:00 AM
From: SE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4969

"I decided for tax purposes to hold thru year end and try to sell on a new years rally." Guess I don't see the "tax purpose" reason. Clearly what you did was correct for you as you made money. Bottom line is to make money, not make a financial decision based on tax purposes. Too many decisions are made for tax purposes. Not enough for strong financial reasons. Remember, taxes are only 30% (roughly)...whereas a profit or loss is 100%.....70% still is in or out of your pocket. Seems to me the reason you held was simply to take advantage of the new years rally and it worked. I guess I don't see the tax purpose reason at all. If you were up at year end and decided not to sell and pay the tax, it worked out OK for you as the stock apparently went higher. However, it could also have gone lower. Make the decision based on where the stock is going to go over the next day, two days or whatever your time frame is and not becuase you did not want to pay taxes. If you felt strongly that a new year's rally would occur, that was your reason for holding and taxes were an afterthought. You could easily find yourself further behind by attempting to save a few bucks in taxes. GO PACK GO! -Scott

To: Don Green who wrote (2263)	1/11/1998 2:29:00 PM
From: steve goldman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4969

Don, Whether you, I or anyone else in here has xx millions in other investment accounts is totally meaningless....that I might have generated xx percent in my long term investments does not excuse bad trading strategies in my trading accounts. Let assume you have over a million dollars in investment accounts, you had over 200K in these two stocks, roughly 20% of your assets in two companies....Most mutual funds, by law, Can't have more than 5% of their assets in any one account. Congratulations! I am truly glad that the position worked out for you. I would never want anything but the best success for anyone on these threads....but I have seen many, many trades, come and go. The truly successful TRADERS don't let mistakes like this happen again. They realize the risks they took, they realize how contra-disciplined it was, and try to never let a position like that get away again. You bought the stock to go up....you bought a lot of it, relative to the account you were working with, relative to the performance you confident in. The stock didn't go up. You hung in there and let the position move away from you so that what could have been a small,meaningless loss at day's end, was now a big loss. You doubled down on less than a 15% correction in a market where high tech stocks have been getting crushed, down 50, 60, 70%....Those two stocks AMAT at 34 and RMBS at 55ish could have easily gone to 19 and 35, without blinking... Like I said, I would rather be lucky than skilled, but you don't come to rely on luck. Regards, steve@yamner.com