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Technology Stocks : IBM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jules B. Garfunkel who wrote (4832)	3/21/1999 5:35:00 PM
From: Bill Martin	Respond to of 8218

Re: I can tell you from experience on the "other side", it is a lousy feeling when you look at IBM's poor quality of earnings quarter after quarter and the stock goes up to new highs. How long do you feel it is constructive for one to have an opinion of a stock directly counter to market action and still be convinced that everyone else is wrong? I don't mean this as a smart remark, but as an honest question that we're all confronted with from time to time. Obviously we all think we are "right" and the market "wrong" for a divergence of a day or two. As a long term investor I've held that opinion in a stock, despite all market evidence to the contrary, for perhaps as much as a year before admitting I must be wrong somehow in my analysis. You admit that you've been convinced the market doesn't know what it's doing for "more than two years now". At what point do you feel an investor should admit that being "right" isn't relevant to the market? That it's more important to be on the right side of the trade than to be "right" about the fundamentals? That in fact one's analysis has been dead wrong for reasons perhaps still not understood? I would argue that this is a very central question to anyone trying to control portfolio losses. Bill