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

To: jeffbas who wrote (7288)	5/23/1999 2:28:00 AM
From: James Clarke	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 78523

That was precisely my argument on this thread four months ago - and unfortunately I acted on it. I sold Boeing at 33 (now 45 and on fire), New Holland at 11 (now 15, peaked at 18), LaSalle Hotels at 12 (now 14) and Cyprus Amax at 11 (now 14). It looked like a good idea at the time, though plenty of people on this thread tried to talk me down. I wish they had tried harder, but it wasn't their fault - I wasn't listening. Thanks for trying (though to be fair I got the same treatment last July when I was right). The lesson I learned was that if you're a deep value investor, you know the stocks you own are worth less than they trade at - otherwise why would you own them? So unless there is a problem in the businesses, do your market timing, if any, with S+P puts. If I had done that I would have a lot more money than I have right now. I agree with the previous poster completely - the market level looks very very dangerous with interest rates rising. I am particularly concerned with the complacency about interest rates - nobody seems to believe they can go above 6% - that's a very small move from current levels. And interest rates over 6% would get people thinking 7%, and then we've got a bloodbath in the stock market. Stop me now before I sell again. No, I learned my lesson. I'll focus on the stocks I own - if they are overvalued now, then I don't need a market call to sell them. And if they're not and I have conviction in the value of the business, I should hope they go down so I can buy more. Lesson learned. There are some very very interesting net-nets out there now if you're into $10-30 MM market caps. I took a list of 50 down to about 10 names which look interesting, with 3 looking like no-brainers. Usually that list of 50 boils down to 5 that are interesting and 1 no-brainer if I'm lucky. My routine is to double back now and do full fundamental research on the ones that look like no-brainers. I'll post a few of them within the next two weeks. I regularly screen for net-nets, but I have always said I only find the no-brainer once every six months. And so far on that strategy of sifting the net-nets I am 4 out of 4, never having lost money and never having waited more than six months for a 30%+ gain. And if you want one now (not one of the three I am looking at because this one is already 20% of my portfolio) Lazare Kaplan (LKI) below 9. I've posted this one several times and gotten remarkably little interest considering the nature of this thread. This would be on my no-brainer list if I didn't already own it big. If I said my price target is 15 scaling up to 25 with a 6-12 month time horizon would that get anybody's attention? JJC

To: jeffbas who wrote (7288)	5/23/1999 2:41:00 AM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78523

Hi Jeffrey, That's been my experience also. The beat up value plays tend to hold up better in a down market than over priced techs but there is usually some down side risk involved. At present I plan to play a few small short term trades while waiting to see what the market does over the next month or so. I picked up some ABN Friday just for grins. They have announced they expect to restate earnings for the past couple years and there is an investigation involved, but book value is $2.26 and they have $5.23 in cash. Quite a bit of debt but at .41 per share I thought it looked kind of interesting. I don't usually mess around much with penny stocks but the fundamentals are better than the average internet stock so I figured I'd try my luck with a little mad money. It gives me something to do while waiting for the next "crisis". Regards, Don