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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: moonsparks who wrote (54482)	4/4/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 132070

Moon, Good questions. Hope I have some good answers. I'm probably going to tell you more than you want to hear, so keep your ignore button at hand. 1. I did take some economics courses as an undergrad, but they had nearly nothing to do with investing. I never invested until I went into the Army, probably because I never had any money before I got that "too steady" job. <g> While wearing green, I was saving a portion of my tiny income every month. At the DOD Language School, I met some fellow service people who invested in the stock market. Also, one of my cousins showed me something fantastic: a chart of The Dreyfus Fund. If you put $10,000 in in 1957, you had $64,000 by 1966. Hey, that was for me. To Hell with savings accounts. <g> I went to a stock broker in Monterey and he wanted to put me into a mutual fund called Ivest. I signed up, but only put in $50, big spender that I was. The guy was a bit too oily for me to trust him completely. One of my Navy Russian language classmates told me he was buying a recent new issue called Medtronic and I decided to do the same. The broker did everything he could to prevent us from buying it, calling it a rank speculation and that we needed better quality. We even had to sign a bunch of papers absolving him of risk. Next, I listened to a savvy Air Force guy who told me Ampex was the coming thing. What I learned from Ivest, Medtronic and Ampex was that brokers and Air Force guys don't know squat, but Navy dudes are O.K. <g>

To: moonsparks who wrote (54482)	4/4/1999 12:43:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Moon, Part Two. Anyway, one big winner and two turkeys taught me that I had to learn how to analyze stocks on my own. I read everything I could find. Most was total crap, just as it is today. But some of the books were outstanding and I think they still hold up today. "The Intelligent Investor," "The War For Stock Market Survival," "Conservative Investors Sleep Well," "Securities Analysis" (the textbook expansion of The Intelligent Investor), Charles McKay's classic about Speculation and the behavior of crowds, "Confessions of a Stock Manipulator (not sure about that title) "The Money Game," "The Funny Money Game", many of the Dow Jones Guides, and even Sylvia Porter and Jane Bryant Quinn have some useful ideas, even though I have been abused at Janes' cruel hand in the past. <G> Then there were several books about the wonders of the options and futures markets, which soon became my main love. Today I would add, "Options As a Strategic Investment," David Dreman's Contrarian books, etc. Also, I cannot exaggerate how useful the hardcore analytic and economic newsletters have been to me over the years. The ones I cut my teeth on are mostly gone now, especially the outstanding ones that were heavy on accounting, but I would recommend current ones like "The High Tech Strategist," "The Tech Review," "The Richebacher Letter," "The Bank Credit Analyst," and even "Value Line." The point is not to agree with all or any of these folks, but to follow their line of thinking and then, with all your resources, including thinking from the other newsletters, try to debunk them. Not that you are trying to prove them wrong, but because you are exercising your analytical skills and playing devil's advocate. You will find flaws in the best of them, but the very best have major arguments that are hard to debunk. Wharton didn't really teach analysis of companies. They mostly taught Modern Portfolio Theory, which stated that analysis was meaningless as those on Wall Street are already doing it for us. <g> Which is why we have seen three generations of analysts hit Wall Street who haven't got a clue about how to analyze a company. <g>

To: moonsparks who wrote (54482)	4/4/1999 12:51:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Moon, Part 3. 2. The next big move in technology will be one that is already in place, IMHO. Biotechnology is much more important than IT, because it is vital to sustaining life and health, and they are the sine qua non of existence. I see more and more convergence of the biological and physical sciences here. New wonder products will be a combo of biotech and IT, if not in the final offering, then in its development. This is nothing new, but I expect it to accelerate in the future. We have gone through a period where biotech was an infant, and, despite the many great products already developed, it is still nothing but a toddler. Meanwhile, we have gone from toddler to maturity on the usage of computers and communications technology. Now that computers are ubiquitous, it is time to find some important uses for them, other than word processing and spreadsheets. There is nothing wrong with word processing and spread sheets, but it would be nice if these items were helpful in other areas. And I think they will eventually be so. Yes, they are used today, but not to the extent I think is necessary. Hope this helps. MB

To: moonsparks who wrote (54482)	4/4/1999 1:50:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 132070

moonsparks: 1) learn about bonds and the bond market too. zero-coupon treasury bonds outperform most stock funds. 2) An MBA is worthless for understanding the stock market. A degree in psych might help. 3) new tech cycle: biotech, yes. But there's a couple other areas. The computer box, the OS, the software, the keyboard all think in English. But the keyboard is a throwback to the days when women used manual typewriters and the tines stuck together if they typed too fast, so the characters were arranged to slow down their typing. And this grossly inefficient qwerty keyboard is what you get to this day. It's lousy in English, and completely incompatible with Chinese or Arabic. We have this fantasy in this country about forcing the rest of the world to learn English, but this represents intellectual genocide of 95% of the world's culture. It can't speak very well, or understand speech. It's uncomfortable to use and lots of people become permanently handicapped using it too much. Keep an eye on China and India for a new tech cycle, they will need to reinvent the PC to make it useful, computers don't have to think in English. 4) You are in the middle of the biggest speculative bubble in human history. Look for the next speculative bubble.