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Dorothy Webster, a San Francisco based recruiter talks about her stock portofolio, the recruitment field, and closing the school, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Webster bought 100 shares of stock in General
Electric after the market reopened.
"It was supposed to be a sure thing," she says.
Instead, it has fallen about $7 per share.
"I don't regret it. I did it for patriotic reasons," she
says.
In the past year, "we've all learned a lot about what it
takes to make a real business," she says. "A lot of
sunlight has come into accounting practices. There's
more integrity and honesty" in corporate America.
"Venture capitalists aren't going to give someone $22
million based on 10 PowerPoint slides."
That doesn't mean she sees the stock market going
anywhere soon.
"It might take 10 years for the market to come back,"
she says. "I believe the late 1990s was a complete
fluke, a bubble, not real."
Webster, 60, hasn't sold any of her stocks and
doesn't plan to. "They're too low to sell," she says.
"I'm going to let them sit there for 15 years. I'll need
the money when I'm 85."
Webster runs a staffing service for technical writers.
She's had to lay off 15 out of 17 people. "Two years
ago, I had 150 orders for technical writers and no
candidates. Today, I have 150 out-of-work writers and
no orders," she says.
To save on rent, she moved her office from San
Francisco to Mountain View. She also closed a
school she ran. "In all good conscience, I can't teach
people how to be technical writers now because they
can't get a job."
She says people in technology who lost money in
tech stocks (including herself) should have known
better.
"All of us in high tech, we knew that everyone bought
(hardware and software) and retooled to convert to
the year 2000. None of us thought, 'Hmmm, we
bought all this new stuff. We're not going to need
anything for three or four years.' I don't know how we
failed to realize what was happening."
Today, Webster is thinking about investing in a
hedge fund, which can sell stocks short if the
manager thinks they're going down. She's also
considering gold. "I want to be diversified. If the
equity market is going down to 7,000, 6,000, 5,000,
gold will go up."
Her biggest investment will be real estate.
She owns a small vacation rental in Santa Cruz.
She's going to borrow money against the land, tear it
down and build a bigger, two-story house with an
ocean view so she can charge more rent.
"I'm looking at it long-term. Just like I believe the
stock market will be at 10,000 or 11,000 in 15 years,
even if real estate goes down, it will be up in 10
years."
______________________________________________________________________
Janis Greenberg
Senior Technical Writer, Oracle Corporation
Server Technologies, Information Development
1op6101 phone 650.607.0554
Janis -dot- Greenberg -at- oracle -dot- com
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