So the peak of 2000 wasn't a good selling point for you? Seems like quite a swing to endure when you're watching your shares go from a high of 48 to a low of 3.
Me..
Yes it was a very painful period. The 10 in bobs10 was the number of stocks I held about that time, all techs. I got out of virtually everything else, but held onto AMD way too long. I never said I don't make mistakes.
Anyway, I really underestimated the fall AMD would take. Still I continued to like AMD so what I ended up doing was selling and buying back lower a number of times. The end result of which was about a doubling of the number of shares I held at a much lower price.
All during the 90's when techs got into their frequent down drafts the stocks usually rallied about 30% within a couple of months of reaching bottom. The problem was I never thought techs would take 90% losses before seeing bottom. Prior to the slaughter a 60% drop was more normal.
Well, to make things even worse I finally got cold feet about $6 and sold everything and in doing so totally missed the bottom. That was the one thing I didn't want to do based on the bagger principle, another major mistake. What I ended up doing was buying back in about where I sold, $6, and ended up with about 4 times the number of shares I had pre split at a much lower price. I then added more shares between $6 and $10.
As you can see I have a very high tolerance to risk. And yes we're not talking a small number of shares either. Certainly not what your typical investor would do. On the other hand lots of people bought above $35 split adjusted and sold much lower. From my point of view you have to have a game plan and the balls to follow it through. I know it might seem like recklessness to many, but it seems to work for me. That doesn't mean you can't change tactics with changes in the environment.
To give you another example. During the y2k run up I bought about 10k shares of a company named Harmonic at about $8. It eventually went to $150 and I ended up selling the last at around $70. The game plan was completely different than AMD but it worked very well. The company never made any money and was just a pure technology play, but boy did it bounce around.
Normally I'm about 75% long and 25% short term. Up until this year that is. This year I've done very little trading and almost none in AMD as I fully expected the price appreciation we've seen. Part of the problem in estimating what my AMD basis is has to do with the 25% I used to trade on a short-term basis.
I certainly hope this hasn't bored everyone to tears, I promise this will be my last post on the subject, for awhile.
