X-Message-Number: 1124 Date: Tue, 11 Aug 92 01:00:11 EDT From: (Perry E. Metzger) Subject: CRYONICS: Alcor's Investment Management Not for sci.cryonics In Re: Eric Klien's message about Alcor procrastinating on the investment recommendations being made; The situation (as Eric has described it; I pass no judgment yet on the accuracy of his report) sounds horrible. I can understand Alcor wanting to study the committee's recommendations, but waiting even more than a few days to make a decision on any of them is madness. In investments, timing is everything. Procrastinating a month on a purchase or sale makes the committee useless. If Alcor feels it does not have the expertise to study the recommendations in a timely way it should get out of the business of managing its own funds and hire a money manager; if it wants to manage the money itself it MUST deal with recommendations as fast as possible; within a day or two at most. If it isn't capable of doing that, it isn't capable of reacting fast enough to manage its own funds. Haste is never a good thing, but we aren't talking about conducting massive fishing expeditions on companies prior to investing in private equity placements; we are talking about open market equities transactions where you can learn everything obvious there is to know about a company in six hours given the last few annuals and 10Ks; allowing a couple of days of time is very generous given that the committee has prescreened all the recommendations. Could someone from Alcor comment on why most of the proposals are being ignored? (I don't want this to sound hostile; I understand how thus far this might not have hit home. I'm just pointing out that managing a few hundred k of the most important money you can imagine, the one and only lifeline for dozens of completely disabled patients, is not a joke, not a matter for amateurs, and certainly not a matter for procrastination. I understand that given the pressures that all the recent suspensions have created this issue may have fallen by the wayside, but it can't be allowed to fall by the wayside in the future. Either someone has to be given a mandate to treat this as a high priority, or a fiduciary has to be appointed.) Perry Metzger Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1124