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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (4988)	3/19/1999 7:58:00 AM
From: SJS	Respond to of 17183

JDN, I'll bet there are thousands of 1998 Schedule D's littered with exercised "covered call" EMC trades and many more EMC long put buys that expired worthless. This has been a very hard stock to time, or do either of the above. Steve

To: JDN who wrote (4988)	3/19/1999 10:05:00 AM
From: VFD	Respond to of 17183

JDN, I am with you. EMC would have to drop at least 30 points for me to just break even (assuming I wanted to buy it back) after paying taxes, and I would only be paying taxes on long term gains.

To: JDN who wrote (4988)	3/20/1999 8:56:00 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

some interesting comments in barrons on options thought you may be interested.. The essential argument of self-styled market sleuths is that as option expiration nears, the Wall Street dealers and other institutions that have sold options to the public try to steer the market in a way that causes the maximum number of those options to expire worthless. In quarterly triple witchings, when stock options and index futures and options all come due, the incentive to fine-tune market movements is all the greater. No one suggests that the big guys make or break bull markets, just that on an hour-to-hour and perhaps day-to-day basis, the muscle-bound trading desks can sometimes have their way with the indexes. One thing a big options seller would want to do is compress market volatility, nudging indexes into a relatively narrow band so that option premiums collapse. Witness the first part of last week, when after a solid but unspectacular 82-point rise on the Dow, the index Tuesday and Wednesday lolled around for losses of 28 and 51 points. And, a true believer might ask, could it possibly be coincidence that the losses Tuesday and Wednesday added up almost exactly to Monday's gain, bringing the index flat before the real expiration-related unwinding got going Thursday? A burst of such automated unwinding activity near Thursday's close was in fact what drove the market up to a level where it could hopscotch back and forth across the 10,000 chalk line before finishing less than three points shy. Another wave Friday morning was the impetus for the push to a morning high of 10,085 before petering out to losses on the day. The action was closely predicted before the open by such options watchers as Jerry Hegarty of Cape Market Research, who further suspects that the tantalizing rallies to exactly 10,001 both Tuesday and Thursday represented the smart money playing mind games with the public.