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Technology Stocks : Veeco Instruments-Who? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (1401)	8/19/1998 3:40:00 PM
From: space cadet	Respond to of 3069

zeev, thanks for the response. I assume your sep is a kind of ira account. Did you know that while you can not short stocks in a retirement account you can buy puts and calls in them. Most brokers won't allow you to do this, but legally it is allowed and a few do allow it. If we ever do get a recession and the bull market ends then there may not be a lot of opportunities to make money longing stocks and the easy money then may be had by going short or buying puts. What would you do in that case? Not that I expect that but it is always a possibility one of these decades, though maybe we will have to wait till 2010 when the boomers start retiring. I noticed you follow the floorless convertibles quite closely. It seems to me that there is almost no risk shorting those stocks and I would like to do that again. I shorted esmc around January quite successfully after they issued one of those floorless convertibles. They were around 10 in Jan and now they are about 3/4. Typical. One of these days I also would like to get in on one of these convertibles. That seems like an almost guaranteed way of earning some easy bucks. I know someone who did that (you need to be qualified by having a pretty nice income) and he made out great. You are guaranteed something like a 20% return on your money for a few months at most, but in reality I think most convertible buyers expect to at least double their money, and some have done much much better, all with virtually no risk. And they say there's no such thing as a free lunch!!!