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

To: dumbmoney who wrote (5606)	3/27/1998 8:32:00 AM
From: Joey Two-Cents	Respond to of 18691

I've found that the precious metal stocks do very well (flight to safety) my favorite is Prime Resources (PRU), North American $ 7 1/2 per share, earned $ .40 per share in 97. In 1997 produced 532,947 oz's of gold and 11.8 million oz's silver (one of the largest silver producers in the world).

To: dumbmoney who wrote (5606)	3/27/1998 8:46:00 AM
From: Kip518	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

This is a very good question. Maybe someone who lived through the '87 crash has some insight. Dumbmoney, I know SI is mostly anonymous posting, but I always assumed that most folks here were not dead or were over the age of eleven! 8-] As one of the old-timers on this tread, I can tell you my foggy memory of those bad-bad days. Like as lot of folks I was blissfully long with a good size margin account when that disaster struck. If felt like standing on a beach watching a monstrous tidal wave moving toward you. You could see it before it hit you. First you are paralyzed with fear. Quotes are like a ball bouncing down steps with increasing wider gaps between them as bids melt (I didn't have real time quote server then so you knew you the catastrophe you were watching was in minutes past -- contributing to the fear). But it wasn't immediately across the board. Big caps went first. Institutions were acting much faster than individuals. I even managed to get out of a couple of smallcap stocks within a point of the pre-crash close, because they were slow to react. But by mid-day the slide was picking up everything. Some stocks would pause, and you'd say "I can hold here, is this it?" Then, they'd start down again. I wasn't paying much attention to shorts in those days, but I would guess stocks with little short interest were the first to be killed -- the crash came from an absence of buyers and shorts are after all buying support when stocks break down. Still, ultimately, they all came down. Some analysts of the 1929 crash say that while the initial crash did great financial damage, the greatest and longest term damage came later when people tried to (in the current phrase) "buy the dip." There was no rebound. (I'd been watching a stock that was hot just before the crash -- VSIN selling in the 40's. When the dust has settled a few days later it was in the low 20's. I bought that dip. But VSIN kept trading down, ultimately, to 2. I haven't looked lately, but I think it is still trading within two or three points of that low. It never came back from 1987). Today, compared to 1987, so much more money is on hot buttons -- institutional & individual (assuming one can get through to their electronic broker, they can panic sell their full account in a heartbeat.) Although I'm basically a shorter now, I do not hope for a market crash. We were lucky in 1987. Kip