Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (16816)	4/18/1998 4:58:00 PM
From: James F. Hopkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 94695

Hi Tippet; Thanks for the compliment, It has done better than I thoght it would, I did OK on her but once again I sold to soon. I won't go back to her at this point.. I do a lot of bottom fishing..( in an up market they have more room to recover..just if the market goes negitive then catching falling knives can get risky. All in all a falling knife is a lot easyer to catch, and less risky than calling a top. Calling a top is the inverse of calling a bottom, but it's got one simple basic premise that makes calling a top far harder and more risky than calling a bottom. "A stock can only go to zero..and lose 100%..but it can and many more stocks go to more than double than ever go broke..and a lot of them go more than that." I think AOL is about as sorry and an over priced stock as there is on the internet..but that means nothing..had I not learned to play her both ways I would have gone broke..hell she went from 45 when I was saying she was going to 30..or lower..and she kept going up..and that was before she split..so from me calling a top at 45 she has gone to over 150 split adjusted..if a person can't learn from that he needs to get out of the market. ---------------------------------------- Short term tops can sometimes be called..but they are still harder to call than bottoms, people that primarly focus on calling tops and buying puts or shorting over picking bottoms are born losers. If they learn bottom picking before they go broke there is some hope for them. Just keep in mind any one who cant catch a falling knife with a greater degree of success than failure, has no business buying puts or going short, as they have the basic premise backwards, and have put the cart in front of the horse. We should learn to pick bottoms first and get good at it before trying to call a top..other wise it's better to get into mutual funds and let the pros manage your bets..there are times I run out of ideas and buy into a mutual fund. ( no loads and CEs only )via my broker. -------------------- I am working up a deal on trading the DIA did SPY for a while but it was skinny pickings..I just about have a good handle on the DIA now..better than anything I could do with the SPY..as the DJI is not a cap weighted index..and really trails the money flow , but by seperating the Mega caps in it from the Smaller ones and weighting them by market cap I get the money flow trend that is leading the index, and can see when the tail is wagging the dog. Regular TA can't do that. Charting an index can lead to serious errors as the index itself can lie worse than a crooked judge. That error is compounded as you go back in time, comparing old tops and bottoms as many of them were not the real tops and bottoms at all..just an illusion of one.. The problem I have with trading DIA..is that the down side to it as well as the SPY..has been so limited that with expence and all, trading out is mostly a waste of time so far only one week in eight did it drop enough to make it worth while, thats a lot of tracking and extra work to get just maybe an extra 1 or 2%..as you can't hardly get the absolute top or bottom and you have that trading expence to. So it looks to me it's still a stock pickers market. Jim