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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dataminer1 who wrote (4836)	6/6/1998 8:53:00 AM
From: OldAIMGuy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18928

Hi Bill and Welcome to the SI AIM BBs, As you probably have figured out from your readings here and elsewhere on SI, there are plenty of ST traders, lots of TA analysers and a few Buy&Hold investors. We AIMers are a small group but are growing in numbers and I believe respect in this public forum. Starting back in the early '90s I was hunting around Prodigy for anyone that might have even heard of AIM. From that search, I started an AIM topic there. About 1-1/2 years ago we migrated to SI. and the transition was smooth as silk. Jill guided me in setting up a thread here and welcomed our small band of cheerful investors. After we settled here in our new home, we began to explore our surroundings and found "fertile ground" for investment information and ideas and active topics on almost any good AIM stock of which we could think! Well, here we are, 4800 messages later! Someone said we should catalog all that's been written (I hope the bad puns will remain in a separate category!) and consolidate it into a library of some sort. Well, Out here in the "Frontier" there's not been much time for cataloging, just keeping up the diary! Longer term AIMers have all faced the same basics as they have learned about Mr. Lichello's algorithm. Even Mr. L. (after 15 years!) admitted that maybe the 50/50 split on cash and equities was a bit conservative for ALL investment categories! Like anything we own and use, we find the best ways to utilize our new assets. Working with AIM is the same thing. The collection of people and experience here and on the AIM "in depth" Q&A page ( techstocks.com ) has made our advancing of the AIM algorithm much faster than we would have accomplished individually. I am sure that your experience will also help. As you have already stated, AIM's a pain in the neck if all one has is paper and pencil and a lot of stocks! The big spreadsheets are a marvel at crunching out numbers and trying new ideas. The first template (and one I still use) for AIM was a DOS based Lotus 123 spreadsheet. Without it I never would have come as far or as quickly in my understanding of AIM. Bill Riedeman worked out a nice Excel based AIM template that many here also share. Bill was one of the first with whom I "talked" about AIM that had a background in closed-loop controllers. These are the industrial equivalents of the "cruise control" that is in lots of cars today. Mr. Lichello's AIM algorithm is a mathematical model for such a control scheme. His experience with more sophisticated models let him range far beyond my own attempts to fine tune AIM. Others have added interesting "self-learning" features to also help with narrowing AIM's range to our target. I'm glad to hear that you are building in some flexibility to your templates. AIM's pretty good by itself, but we AIMers need to express our own investment personalities and goals by manipulating AIM's internals. Your product's price looks quite reasonable. Personally, I use Bob Norman's Newport program for managing the dozens of investments that I oversee. I still dig out my AIM template for 123 once in a while to create a "what if" and test a new idea, but my time has become limited for that form of exercise. The full blown spreadsheets are excellent for that work. I complement you on the hard work that you have put into creating the half dozen various templates. I know the MAC users are very interested. Learning to design a web page is a whole study all in itself! I learned how using the MSMD methods (that's Monkey see, Monkey do!). Just about the time I finished my first pages on Prodigy, I began to realize that they already looked "dated!!" However, with a bit of make-up and powdering their noses, I've been able to keep them respectable. I'll probably have to do a full lyposuction and face lift one of these days, however! Again, welcome and congratulations on a job well done. We're looking forward to hearing more about your stock picks and other experiences. Keep the good ideas flowing! Best regards, Tom

To: Dataminer1 who wrote (4836)	6/6/1998 3:21:00 PM
From: Bruce A. Bowman	Respond to of 18928

Hi Bill and welcome! Always glad to have another AIMer aboard. I found your site a couple months ago when I did an Alta Vista search. I try it every few months just to see what's changed. When I told Tom about it, I found out he'd already found you guys and had been in contact with you... pretty agile for a guy that races vintage Jaguars and hangs onto the DOS version of Lotus! :-) Looking forward to any input you might share with us about picking stocks. My own ability with fundamental analysis is primitive at best. If I can't rely on a search of a database, I'm in trouble. I've admitted to that failing on this forum for over a year and have failed to fix it in all that time. :-) Getting some insight into how others approach the selection process would be a great help. Like Tom, I use Newport for all position management. When it comes to testing, though, there's nothing at the moment that beats a spreadsheet. I had a lot of (forced) experience with spreadsheets when I did proposals for a few years. I'm in awe of the power these data-crunchers have. The level of sophistication today is incredible. Somebody new to AIM that needs to become familiar with the inner workings of the AIM algorithm and to satisfy themselves about LT performance would do well to at least start with a s/s environment. Bruce