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Strategies & Market Trends : Tech Stock Options -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j g cordes who wrote (51581)	9/5/1998 3:22:00 PM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58727

Don't be silly, you owe me no apology. Believe it or not, I am always a bit sensitive about posting off topic. I don't think it's necessarily fair. However, ethically I sense I am rude when I do not respond to a post, off topic or not. The times when I initiate the off topic post, unprodded, is a personal failing, I suppose. I think of it this way to alleviate my guilt. When playing golf, perhaps 35% of the conversation is about golf and the rest is anything from jokes to personal stories to letting off steam. Take someone like you who may travel once in a while on business to Boston. While in the car for 4 or 5 hours you and a companion may discuss business 60% of the time and unrelated stuff the balance. Here, I have no human contact for the most part. So something happens and I end up sharing it here because it's an outlet. Usually an impolite thing to do but otherwise I would go stir crazy. The winter months I am far worse, as I cannot go beat golf balls. Unfortunately my trading is generally better in the summer and I attribute that to more personal contacts, primarily on the links and primarily with other people in the business who speak with more in-depth knowledge than I. So for me, golf is inextricably entwined with the markets. Which, happens to work for me. Golf actually preceded trading and if it were not for the crowd I play golf with, I may never have decided to do this full time. I had a lot of experienced people in my "Support Group" as it were, and that may be why I usually will try to help someone else if I think I can. It's sort of payback, I guess. As for your compliments I would have to be self-deprecating only because what I said prior is quite true. I know how and why I think the action will be this way or that but I cannot put a rational post together to convey my thoughts. My methods are based primarily on visualizing patterns. I think I came close to explaining some of it to Scott (who now uses a completely different method) but without sitting down and going over stuff one on one it's very hard to explain in this medium. Don is far better because he can crunch the numbers and come up with a reasonable thesis. Me, all I have to say is "well, it looks like the pattern is up until 10, 10:10 then down into lunch". I'm somewhere between the person who notes Mars is going to affect Oil Prices and the person who says "Heads I buy, Tails I sell". As far as Global sentiment we all know the Market likes to climb a wall of worry, and so I think the market has a bit of surprising upside at least short-term early this week. But, however, the bad news has been coming in waves for around a year. Sooner or later the market just has to cave into it. The bad news is just not going away. A proper hedge in my view, which obviously should have been in place some time ago, is not to have more than 50% exposure....perhaps not even more than 40%. Such a heavy cash position will be nice to have when/if the markets flatten out. Finally, a fait accompli may be the 55 day cycle which hits next Monday, I believe. Then my good friend in Florida using some other kind of cycle madness has September 28th, I think it was, for a debacle. Using some sort of cycle stuff he is very good with his calls. But the 55-day cycle is the self-fulfilling prophecy very often it seems. So my opinion, such as it is, is to be particularly leery of these two Mondays. I know it's tantamount to believing David Copperfield is not an illusionist but these cycle theories have an odd way of repeating themselves......otherwise they would not be cycles, no?