To: larry who wrote (2159 ) 2/3/1998 2:44:00 AM From: space cadet Respond to
larry, I too find it much much easier to find good longs than shorts. With most shorts you have to be extremely quick to get in at just the right time and then to get out with a profit while you still have one. Plus as I explained in a long post a while ago, puts are an absolute ripoff compared to calls. If anything, calls are underpriced, while puts are dramatically overpriced. I probably would have made something close to what you did last year except for a disastrous misstep with the disk drive sector in the fall (pun intended). Fortunately in just the past couple of weeks I've made somewhere between 25-50% so I'm feeling a lot better now. I personally think this is not a good time to be shorting stocks, and just have avnt as my sole remaining short which I will probably exit with a profit tomorrow. I certainly wouldn't short the msft's, dell's, and csco's, they're heading much higher. And I wouldn't short the hi-flyers either, the yhoo's aol's etc. as they too seem quite strong now. Actually my stupidest call since the disk drive fiasco was buying puts on yhoo. Now that I've looked into it seriously I believe yhoo is a great long, not short. Since I'm really a bottom fisher cheapo I'm waiting for yhoo to come down a little but I could see yhoo moving up 10 times from here easily . Look at yhoo's capitalization versus msft's and you will see it has room to expand quite a bit. I think yhoo is now the chief threat that msft faces, not nscp (a has-been- would have made a terrific short), sunw, or orcl.
