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

To: steve in socal who wrote (5838)	10/15/1998 2:54:00 AM
From: Bruce A. Bowman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18928

Hey, dude! If we split the load of writing at the blackboard, we can be done in half the time. Hope that doesn't mean we only learn half the lesson!! :-) What a painful - and unnecessary - experience this has been. Let's get started: i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, i WILL take profits, penniless in petaluma

To: steve in socal who wrote (5838)	10/15/1998 7:29:00 AM
From: OldAIMGuy	Respond to of 18928

Hi Steve, It's nice to hear that you've been doing something more productive than chasing little white balls around a grassy knoll! At times in my working career I was too busy to accomplish everything that needed doing, even with 7 - 12 hour days a week. I also remember the last 6 months of my working for a living. The aluminum casting industry was in the deepest recession that it had had in a long time. I felt as though I could take a 5 year sabbatical and there'd be no phone messages on my desk when I got back. My good friend took over for me after I left and kept at the effort of educating the die casters, permanent molders and Al sand foundries and eventually it paid off. The foundry and casting industry is one of the deepest cyclicals there is. It's boom or bust. Well, now it's been a 12+ year sabbatical and I'm still surviving and have expanded my acquaintances tremendously in the last 5 years via this goofy screen and keyboard. We're in the middle of the third significant small cap BEAR market that I've seen as a full time investor. I've made two buys in BSX in recent weeks. One about the same price as you and another at about $50+ a week or so ago. Yes, it wouldn't feel as good if we hadn't had those nice Sell orders about 6 weeks ago!! Mr. L and I have both tried very hard to make AIM usable for the "Person on the Go" but as you know, sometimes we just plain run out of time. Sorry to hear about those lost opportunities. Another part of it is some internal "denial" that comes into play when the market really sucks BIG TIME. It's hard to face even a little bit of bad news when the gray economic clouds roll in. I've been feeling like a fisherman with no more bait recently. There's some good catches out there, but I've caught my limit. I've now read in several places about the very effect you brought to the board's attention several months ago. You had mentioned how difficult it was to get product in from Asia because all the containers were "booked" for trips to USAland, but none were returning for the next trip. Several articles mention that to beat this, many importers are having to book "round trips" with the container being returned empty, just to assure that there will be available space for the next shipment. Thanks for that heads up report! From your point of view, has the situation improved yet? Yes, I'm interested to see how VLSI and IDTI play out over the next 6 months. IDTI seems to have been about 6 months behind the market place for their Intel clone chips. They have missed the speed ramp-up and missed market share potential. I'm still waiting for them to concentrate on the laptops because their chip is quite energy efficient. Maybe when the price wars start in the laptop business, their low power consumption will draw attention. From a business view, they still have excess capacity in their new fab. in Oregon. this is a big drain on them right now. It could also be a boon if chips get out of their slump. VLSI is being unfairly abused because of its association with chip makers on one side and the telecommunications industry on the other. They are bad boys for making chips and even worse for trying to sell them to the communications customers. With a 52 week high of $37+ and a recent low of $6, it adds new meaning to the term "HIGH BETA ", doesn't it!!!??? Expanding business with AAPL will help, the telecomm people have made their inventory adjustments and VLSI has new chips ready for the next round of cell phones. This doesn't seem to me to be indicative of bad business going forward. I believe VSLI was to announce their quarterly results either last night or tonight. I'll check when through here. Last time I checked, VLSI was selling at a fraction of Book Value and at about its "cash on hand" value per share. This would seem to be a pretty good floor for the stock. I'm loaded with shares. I've had to borrow space in the Warehouse from other stocks just to store all the certificates. If I'm right on VLSI's future, it will mean a 5-figure increase in my net worth for every dollar that its price rises. I now have more than twice my previous peak # of shares in VLSI. Note also, that a former legal eagle of VLSI's returned to the company to be one of the officers. Rumor was that the COO that left had formed his own agenda which was in conflict with CEO's view. We'll know pretty soon who was right!! Best regards, Tom