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Strategies & Market Trends : Systems, Strategies and Resources for Trading Futures -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paxb2u who wrote (6655)	10/17/1998 5:11:00 PM
From: Mary A Young	Respond to of 44573

Hi everyone: Been away for a week or so here. However, I haven't neglected to read your log of the market. What a wonderful thread! This past week I sat down with my full service broker and reviewed our portfolio there. In addition, I found her to be as clueless as many of our friends and acquaintances who are consistently asking me about the market. Of course, my broker was encouraging us to stay invested where we are with our mix of bonds, cash and mutual funds...a few stocks. In fact, she was urging us to invest more in the funds with the rationale that the managers watch our money for us and move in and out so we don't have to. How naive!!!!! Mutual funds tend to have such large stakes in a some stocks that they cannot move in and out as easily as they might like. When I said I'd like to raise more cash, she was just dumbfounded telling me about the wonderful opportunities in these beaten up stocks. I told her that they might be wonderful opportunities for a day or two, but after that, I'm not confident, hence I trade. Most of my every day friends who have money in something besides bonds and CD's, have an attitude that says, "oh well, I'm in it for the long haul." One of these friends has money in shares of Boston Chicken. His attitude is, "they'll be back someday." Its going to take an awful lot to scare the every day person because of the market's euphoria in recent years. And many many brokers fall in the same category. How many are urging you to do things to protect your positions? Not many I bet. I haven't found one. Someone posted earlier that we are not in the same market as we were, even in July. How true. But for the so called "learned", those who say that they can do a better job with our money than we can, they have not changed. How many of us have changed our strategies within the last year? I have, a couple of times, and not always so profitably, I admit. I heard something on television last evening about the real estate market. With the low interest rates, people are rushing to refinance mortgages, go into investment properties, etc as an alternative to the market. Not being well versed on cycles, etc., I'm not sure where we are in the real estate cycle, but I found that interesting and have been considering doing more real estate investing as well. My point in all this is: a) We won't see a bottom unless the man in the street is scared too. b) People are naive as to what can happen as a result of our global economy and how it affects us in America. c) Not everyone is seeing the stock market as the safe, albeit risky haven that it sometimes has been seen to be by baby boomers. People are looking at other ways of enhancing wealth. These are some of my thoughts on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Mary