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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Rudd who wrote (5799)	1/19/1999 11:09:00 AM
From: Michael Burry	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78486

Re: options I gave up on all types of options a while ago. At first I just sold calls. Then I took an options course, examined every possible strategy (they hand out a nice cheat sheet), and chose synthetic longs and call-ratio backspreads as my tools, using real time data with OptionStation. The level of sophistication in pricing these things is much higher than most casual options players suspect, and IMO the market is much, much, much more efficient than stocks. After trying futures, options, tech analysis, and feeling that I was running in circles (thankfully I never lost my shirt - especially in the commodities) I've determined that plain stocks are the most rational area to find discrepancies in value large enough and analyzable enough, given the facilities available to me in terms of time and technology, to give outsized returns. I agree with Bob that the best books are by McMillan (ignore the stuff from Angell). But everyone should also know exactly what they're getting into, and that means seeing the real-time options pricing and search software in action prior to doing it. IMO, options are absolutely nothing about the price of the underlying security (they are everything about correctly interpreting the security's volatility differently than the market), and hence poor substitutes to simple shorts, which for now I'm continuing to use. Mike

To: Bob Rudd who wrote (5799)	1/19/1999 7:04:00 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Respond to of 78486

>>BTW: Since many on this board consider the subject of shorting high-fliers..and the exploration of strategies for doing so, to be outside the realm of value investing, should we consider moving further discussion to John G's Shorting stocks: High fliers forum: Subject 15251 Most of the folks that post there have primarily fundamental, research-driven orientation. << I know. There was a bit of a discussion going on by some of the other contributors about shorting stocks. I just wanted to present an alternative. Wayne