Five years ago, when I'd heard Barbra Streisand had given up singing to fool around with Pfizer, I quickly arrived at the conclusion that Internet mania had reached its pinnacle. If Barbra was trading the stock market, then everybody had to be. If there was ever a red flag that should have had investors fleeing for cover, that was it.

Somehow, Streisand, the self-proclaimed perfectionist, seemed at the time to be a prime candidate to be annihilated by a game that is a perfectionist's worst nightmare, particularly at the height of an Internet bubble.

Streisand, I figured, was too emotional, too high-strung, too sensitive and too sentimental for a game where one needs to display all the emotion of a mime.

Trading the market requires a cold, calculating, no-nonsense approach. So it seemed a safe bet that Barbra was the last person on earth who would have the guts to pull the trigger on her beloved Old Yeller (Nasdaq:MUTT) when the market reared its ugly head. As a trader, she had to be out of her league.

When you heard Streisand had broken into the game by loading up on $89 US shares of Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) based on her love for Viagra, the company's blockbuster drug, and sold soon after at $120, you wrote it off as beginner's luck. So what if she was boasting about making a quick flip of stock in eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY) for a $180,000 US profit? In a market where just about everything on the Nasdaq was shooting up like mad, Aunt Bea could've chalked up those kinds of returns in 1999.

Then, there was this intriguing quote from Streisand about her trading style that struck me with the force of a trading halt. It was something you'd have expected from a grizzled veteran of the trading wars, not a raw rookie. It made you think that "Funny Girl" may actually have the right stuff for this crazy game.

"I can't stand to see red in my profit-and-loss column," Streisand told Profit magazine. "I'm Taurus the Bull, so I react to red. If I see red, I sell my stocks quickly."

In a volatile market where trading your portfolio seems an absolute necessity, it's a philosophy that can save many investors from financial ruin.

In the dreadful market of recent weeks, investors have been seeing a lot of red in their portfolios. They could do worse than heed the advice of The Wealthy Barbra.

Of course, words of wisdom are worth about as much as your shares in VisuaLabs or any other catastrophe from the tech bubble if you can't act on them.

If you're like most investors, you know it's time to get real and sell when you start seeing red in your portfolio, yet you freeze with one hand on the sell button.

You can't bring yourself to squeeze the trigger. Which is human nature. Still, that doesn't make it right.

When faced with a loss, many traders are overcome by emotion and it's emotion that separates the winners from the losers. A reluctance to sell turns into a vicious cycle. The trader becomes petrified at the prospect of booking a loss.

Then, he goes into denial. Eventually, he talks himself out of common sense and discipline. He chucks the rulebook out the window.

He starts to see green (in his fantasies), desperately clinging to the hope that Old Yeller gets back in the green column.

He waits and waits and waits while a minor loss becomes a major loss. The stock drops into oblivion.

Did Streisand execute on her own advice by selling some of her Internet stocks such as Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) before they fell out of bed in 2000 and 2001?

Unfortunately, Babs hasn't called the Edge to update us on her performance.

Yet, she was quick to attack the New York Post when the newspaper started tracking her portfolio based on the stocks she talked about in the magazine article.

When the Post suggested her fans go hat in hand in aid of this victim of the dot-com crash and poked fun at her reputation as a perfectionist, The Wealthy Barbra was quick with a rebuttal on her website (www.barbrastreisand.com).

The website states in response to the Post: "Just because one buys eBay in October it doesn't mean one owns eBay in June. Rest assured that (Streisand's) average is still way up there."

Later, in another rebuttal to the Post, it was pointed out on the website that her personally managed portfolio was outperforming the S&P 500 index and most professional money managers.

I'd bet that Taurus the Bull has been dumping her dogs like crazy lately, considering the blood-red state of the market.

Selling losers is painfully excruciating to rookie investors, but being humbled is all part of the coming of age for traders. Once you learn to swallow your pride and dump your losers, you've graduated as a bona fide trader.

If Streisand is still following her own words of wisdom, she's probably still making a killing in the stock market, even though some of her favourite stocks of a few years ago such as eBay and Amazon have been thrashed.

On the other hand, if Taurus the Bull is still holding that impotent dog Pfizer at $27, well, maybe she's The Less Wealthy Barbra.

* SAGE WORDS: "Success to me is having 10 honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice."

- Barbra Streisand.

HOT STOCK: Voice Mobility International
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Up 18 cents (+19.8%) on 493,400 shares (based on Canadian stocks over $1 for week ending April 29)
In a crummy stock market that has been shrugging off good news by many companies, Voice Mobility stole the show on the TSX, surging on extraordinary volume. The stock made its move on no news as investors speculated that something was up at the Vancouver-based messaging software company. While most tech stocks have been getting hammered, Voice Mobility, which is partnered with U.S.-based Avaya (NYSE:AV), has seen its stock soar 80 per cent in a seven-week span.

HOT STOCK: MENU FOODS INCOME FUND
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Here's one more rude awakening for shell-shocked income trust investors who thought these things were bullet proof. Menu Foods unitholders ushered the company to the doghouse when the pet food manufacturer said its distribution payment for May would be reviewed based on preliminary financial results for the first quarter. The Mississauga company has been paying unitholders a monthly distribution of 10.5 cents per unit.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)