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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (3205)	2/18/1998 9:11:00 PM
From: larry	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

Roger, I agree. That's why I have only four positions in my account currently. two of them are covered calls and I believe will be called out by the end of the week. One issue I will probably sell soon. So I will basically keep cash or find some non-volatile issues to write some covered calls. However, can you tell me why bears are usually pretty stubborn about their position? Will it be better to cater the trend of the market when it turns north? Basically we are in an incredible bull market for the past several years and I believe it's much much easier to make $$ on the long side. Yes, everyone has been crying that a major market correction is coming (for several years in a row) and yet each correction is met with a stronger bull market. I used to believe tht the market will tank someday. Right now I don't think so. Corrections will come but bears probably will have to wait for longer than everyone thinks. BTW, I have heard people taking about market top all the time. So where is the top? I don't see it. 99%+ people said that the previous high was top and yet Dow breaks them each time. 99% people are wrong then. I like your comment that you believe that DELL is gonna flatten sometime and yet you are wrong each quarter. Bears must have super strong belief in themselves otherwise... larry!

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (3205)	2/18/1998 9:34:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

Long ranting post, forgive, good quote at bottom. I wonder if the tendency for everybody to jump in on dips will prevent a very sharp and sustained correction. Instead, a correction will come in fits and starts--we will go up to dow 9000...then drop to 8000...then recover to 8700 etc. With very few lower lows or higher highs the technical analysts will go nuts. If you turn bearish, no reward. If you turn bullish no reward. When everybody is so whipsawed they are not having fun anymore, then quietly, with no indication it has begun, the sustained bear market arrives. I have made some idiotic trades in the last couple days--I've doubled the threads I subscribe to, I've read all the posts of the people I've book- marked. And now I have less confidence than ever that I can pick a good stock, much less short or put something. Maybe it is futile! Trading is very hard, but investing in the latter stages of a bull market would be foolhardy. So there is clearly nothing to do! Except hoard cash and wait. I'll continue to maintain my bearish stance, but I do not beleive that I will be able to make any money on the puts. I may make one more bet sometime in the next couple months, and that could be my last-- when will this madness end? I realize I am on a rant, but I want to leave you with a quote for the day, maybe it will give you any bears on the thread some comfort. Maybe it will give some bulls a little fear. For whatever reason when I finished my book today, this one sentence seemed to me to be more profound than anything else in that excellent story. "Far more important than the rate of interest and the supply of credit is the mood. Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich." --John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929.