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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Clarke who wrote (6051)	1/10/1998 4:41:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Jack, I had exactly the opposite sorts of problems. I kept trying to get my parents out of the market in 1969 and then more vociferously in 1972-73. By that time they were taking advice from "professionals" in a bank trust department. At one point 25% of their net worth was in Polaroid, then at $145. They did get out at about $95 and did miss the drop to, what was it, about 17. One of the bank people put my mother's total assets into Eastman Kodak--the "one decision" theory. She ended up losing at least a third of it. The third and last time I tried to influence the bank was in 1986. There's a lot more to this, but that's enough for this post. For a bank investment officer, to be a contrarian puts one's job in jeopardy at least as much as body-piercing would. My own major mistake was (using careful application of Milton Friedman's statistics) to conclude in the mid-eighties that very high inflation was again inevitable and that the silver market would revive, a false analogy with what stocks do after a crash. I never imagined how much money one could lose simply by rolling over one single futures contract in silver--especially since at first I seemed to be completely correct. My daughter is more conservative than I am now. She puts everything in an insured credit-union account--including half of her college dining bill for the semester (she legally sold a half membership in an eating co-op that I had paid for and put her food money in the savings account). But I think she may want to buy stocks if the market tanks. One last thing I haven't mentioned in a while: I know at least two graduate students who have used some of their scholarship money to buy mutual funds.