In "The Bear Book" by John Rothchild, he devotes a chapter to this topic called "If You Make Money in a Down Market, Don't Tell the Neighbors".
Sell 'em Ben Smith and Jesse Livermore, both of whom profited during the crash of 1929, bore the wrath of broken bulls. They were investigated by the government and heckled, harassed, and stalked by the public. They had to travel incognito and hired body guards for protection.
A more recent case is Jimmy Rogers who publicly predicted and profited from the crash of 1987. He became the target of much hatred as well. He said "If I ever make money being bearish again, I won't go on TV talking about it. I'll sit there and moan and groan like everybody else."
Now a more personal story. For the first few months that I posted on this board, I used to include my e-mail address. Sometime last January, I made a post on this board critical of Amazon.com's business model. It was at a time when AMZN had fallen from it's peak at 100 to about 70 over the prior 10 days. Just after that post, AMZN fell further to about 50 in the next couple of days. I received about a dozen hateful e-mails (from different people) blaming "people like me" for their losses. In one of these e-mails the person included my real name and address. Nothing personally threatening was said but the hidden message was "I know who you are and where you live". That was quite a wake up call. I thought, my god, what will it be like when the real bear market hits? That's why I stopped using my e-mail address -- best to remain anonymous.
In short, bears are ridiculed when they are wrong but hated when they are right (because people blame them for their losses). FWIW, I plan to keep a low profile. |
