Very good points jagman, but so are Sam's.
I do get tired of hearing several of the bashers on this board and others talking about how stupid the longs are here and how much better investors they would be if they wouldn't stick with a loser stock. Seems to me that most of the bashers are hanging onto their FASC stock also. Makes me go hmmmm. There are many many investors that learned some very valuable lessons over the last few years since around May of 2000.
My wife has asked me repeatedly about a lot of my different stocks, shouldn't we sell and put the money into good stocks? I remember one of those conversations very well, our broker had just reccomended Enron, and another broker told me about a stock that I needed to buy into. We all know about Eron, the other stock I can't even remember the name now, but had had something like 38 quarters in a row of beating estimates and was on a tear. Within six months of that reccomendation it was sub-penny, down from $38. No, I hadn't bought either one, thank God.
Yes there are a lot of good stocks out there, as well as some good mutual funds, but big board or penny, you can lose your shirt if you marry it.
Some of us just haven't or don't want to take that time anymore to research and watch the ticker every day with our hands on the sell and buy button. Stop losses can be a good thing, but I have seen the MMs take a stock down for just a few minutes to take stop losses out, just before a nice pop in the stock. Plus the fact, a 7% stop loss sounds great, but often times if they drop fast, it is activated on the way thru, but you don't get your shares sold until things bottom out.
There is a big difference between traders (good or bad) and those that are happy to buy and hold living with the knowledge that generally the dips will be overcome by even better gains over the long haul. Of course I am talking about quality stocks, not the average penny stock.
Many of us have learned from our mistakes, but many of us still have a certain amount of hope that FASC will somehow pull thru and become as big as we have hoped. There are extremes on both sides of the fence with FASC, but the majority of the shareholders here realize that this is dead money for right now and are willing to leave it at that. I really feel the bashers own a pretty good chunk themselves and are hoping to get out on a nice pop.
Did they bail on this last one? I doubt it, but just like you, we will hear all about how we could have made money on the spike. Yeah, we could have, if we had bought at the bottom and sold at the top, or if we had just sold at the top and turned our money into cash we could be looking for another entry point. Sure, but if you are going to start playing that game, why play it with FASC???
I don't trade much at all anymore, but when I did and if I were to do it again, I darn sure want a stock that moves more often and I would have a better chance of getting out of when it does pop. You need volume for that.
