Hi Too Fuzzy, On Going down to zero”
Other than the residual BUY that you find annoying (and I don't see as a problem) the only problem with AIM has to do with using an individual stock in an AIM account and having that stock go to zero. But then that is a "problem" for a "BUY and HOLDER" also.
If that "going to zero" is the only "problem" with AIM then there is nothing to worry about! The only investors that structurally bail out at a 10% drop in stock prices will normally avoid going down to zero but they too can be caught if a stock collapses suddenly. . .if sell orders stack up and there are no buyers due to bad news.
The cure for this is over the top AIM is to study the funds and keep a finger on the pulse of the market and to bail out in time. The problem here is that AIM was originally marketed as system for the investor that knows nothing about investing and wanted to look only once per month at prices of SAFE stocks. With that approach you certainly need an external mechanism to bail out when things might go down to zero.
I do not see investing that way and therefore I am. . I mean I was. . .an aggressive investor using more or less the AIM technique(without ever making an AIM-calculation for my trading). From this I used the basic AIM-ideas to develop Vortex for aggressive investors but with the possibility to tune it down for non-aggressive investors. . .only making small trades up and down, even making it possible to tune Vortex down to make it virtually a Buy and Hold System.
You are quite correct that preventing "going down to zero" can effectively be done by investing only in funds. . .as I have done also very effectively, for instance investing in the Latin American Equity Fund. This way I had great volatility and the assurance that this fund would not collapse overnight. On the other hand I used the basic AIM/Vortex method also on quite a few volatile stocks and had to bail out a few times. One time I invested in a penny stock and did not get a chances to AIM it. . .it went down (how far can a penny go down?) to zero as I gambled on it. . . the sell order was not executed.
But the questions of how to deal with "going down to zero" is an old topic that was discussed from the start of the AIM technique. It is not really an AIM or a Vortex issue but an investment management issue that you have to implement as a shell around the AIM/Vortex-core.
AI
