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Pastimes : John Dessauer's Investors World -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carl parent who wrote (1592)	9/28/1998 6:45:00 AM
From: Wren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2346

Carl, you make a good point, but also show the difficulty of following JD. I also subscribed to Investors World because of the foreign recommendations. I have tried to monitor the stocks that I have bought, but it is hard to get complete information on foreign stocks. JD has proved to be a good foreign stock picker, and I have made money on most of his international recommendations. You state that an investor should not rely on one person. It is much harder to monitor investments in foreign stocks, so the person making international recommendation assumes a much more important role than an advisor who recommends US stocks. For example, I watched STD run up and fortunately, sold solely because the P/E became very high for a bank. I sold after the STD market top, but saved myself several thousand dollars by selling. My story with CPPKY and FFS is not as happy. In those cases, I continued to average down as JD continued to recommend the companies as buys. Now he doesn't even mention these stocks anymore, so I am left with only the information that I can get online. JD seems to become enamored with the stocks he picks and simply rides most of them back down before he recommends selling all or even part or a position. I have reached the conclusion that, unless JD begins to do a much better job of keeping us informed, I will not renew in January when my subscription expires. I now believe that I will be better off in one of the good mutual funds for the international portion of my portfolio.

To: carl parent who wrote (1592)	9/28/1998 2:24:00 PM
From: Ralph C. Cinque	Respond to of 2346

Thanks Carl, I'm sure you have the right attitude. However, I still think it makes no sense to watch a large profit in a stock dwindle away to nothing the way Dessauer has done repeatedly. He does tend to get very personal about his stocks. ("I know Wally over at Comshare, and I know he wants to retire soon, and all his money is tied up in Comshare stock, so he has to get the stock price up!") And like Wren, I averaged down on CPPKY and FFS. I find it baffling that Dessauer would sing the praises of FFS at 9, 8 and 6, and then say nothing, not a word, when it falls to 4, 3 and 2. If it was a good buy at 9, wouldn't it have to be a table-pounding steal at 2? Regarding CD, Dessauer first recommended it (I think) at 24 after it crashed with the announcement of the accounting fraud. Interestingly, David Kadlec in Time magazine at the same time used CD as an example of a stock to sell (at 24). His reasoning was that rarely is the initial plunge in a stock like that the true bottom, that generally such stocks go lower after they plunge because it takes a while for all the bad news to become diseminated and for all the disenchanted to get out. So, even if you had paid $40 for it, he thought that you should sell it at $24. I think it hit a low of about $10.