Dear Bob,
I guess you can't offer an honest observation on this thread without getting attacked ad homonim by someone who doesn't agree with it. It's too bad that Mark Hulbert doesn't track Bishop, Grandich, and other mining analysts (he hasn't started, has he?) I would guess that if you followed Hulbert's rules (e.g. adding a position to a model portfolio when a newsletter reader would have received it in the mail, selling when the reader would have received the sell recommendation) my guess would be that few if any of them would have outperformed any benchmark index. If any did, I'm sure they'd advertise it. If anybody knows of any, let me know. And if they do, how long of a period are we talking about.
I've been at several mining conferences now and have observed Peter Grandich, Bishop, Doug Casey, and several of the other regulars who seem to travel from conference to conference. I remember asking Grandich at one conference if Franco Nevada would have as much leverage as other gold stocks if gold went up, since they were a royalty company, and he said yes. I don't think that was a correct answer. I've seen a lot of his glossy 2-4 page paid recommendations that companies put in their due diligence kits, and don't have any trust in his accumen at all. I think one went on about how the company was unusual because it had experienced GEOLOGISTS as officers and directors, implying that that was very unusual. NOT! I seem to recall that he recommended Siskon(around 5 or 6 at the time,I think; about 21 cents now) and stopped recommending Bema before it started its big run in 1996. His glossy was missing in Bema
s DD package that year. Coincidence? I saw a few months ago that some company was paying him I think it was $3000/mo as a "consultant" plus some up front money, and I think he did one of this 2-4 page glossies. He always likes to thank his savior, Jesus Christ, and actually apologized for saying that gold would go to 500 in 1995, so he likes the "I'm just a regular kind of guy" approach vs. the hard sell approach.
My guess is that at these conferences they all get together for drinks and laugh hysterically about the fools that buy the stocks they recommend.
At one of these conferences, some guy on a panel about regulating newsletters was critizing certain newsletter writers and went through a litany of questionable things that some of them did, such as taking money from companies to promote them and also recommending them, taking first class travel for inspection tours of the company's mining properties, etc, and following him Bishop, who apparently did many of the things mentioned, started defending each one, saying how he traveled so much that he needed to fly first class, and so on. It was quite funny.
Bottom line is that I don't trust any of these guys, and my distrust is not based on losing money based on following their recommendations, its from observing their actions.
I guess I have offended them, but they can cry all the way to the bank. By the way, I got John Doody booted off some threads for shamelessly touting himself and going on for paragraphs about how great he was and how you could go to his web site. The webmaster thanked me for my heads up. I also a Grandich thread that I believe he started 86'd for duplicating his already existing thread.
It sure is a jungle out there, and the newsletter writers, or many of them are part of the jungle, not the map thru it.
I wonder what motivates people like Grandich. They sound like they have millions. Why do they continue to take money indiscriminately from companies and promote them? Don't they ever have enough? |
