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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (5113)	5/13/1999 8:35:00 PM
From: Justa Werkenstiff	Respond to of 15132

Ian: Re: "When a company deliberately chooses not to communicate with its investors equally, why take this additional risk." Unfortunatley, almost every company engages in this behavior with analyst conferences and retreats or hallway conversations or parties. Re: " Especially, after letting the company know that the SEC officially frowns upon this act which borders on encouraging illegal insider trading." You are right. But I looked at the SEC site and read the complaint procedures and the turnover time and I am not convinced the SEC is paying anything but lip service to this policy which is good in and of itself but not necessarily sufficient if the companies ignore the SEC and nothing happens to them. Re: "Personally, I believe there are literally dozens of good to outstanding investments. Why should anyone take this additional risk?" Greed <g>? Good point. In all fairness, SFAM offers replays of its conference calls to everyone. Moreover, I do not view any of these companies as investments for long term holding except with the possibile exception of AMAT. They are vehicles for profit for me plain and simple. The five year price appreciation record for many of these companies sucks given their risk. Re: "Perhaps we should organize an Individual Investors' Boycott of those companies that refuse to disclose information to us on an equal basis." I admire your idealism but I think you and I know this is not realistic. (Maybe a shareholder proposal would be better -- how could management respond other than to recommend it <g>). Many of these companies don't care about you and me as shareholders because the institutions own many of them. We are little nothings to them. I am sure some IR folks would rather have us go away. Maybe the net will change this over time (look how we were able to get SFAM information anyway from Lex and others) but for now the only satisfaction I have in this situation is taking the big boys to the cleaners every chance I get <g>. I have no choice but to play by their rules but I can try to beat them.