Re: Group Think
I think it is a very healthy sign that this thread seems so concerned with the possibility of group think. The thread portfolio analysis that Stan did such a wonderful job on may have led some to conclude that group think is in evidence since so many people own QCOM and especially GMST. However, I think the opposite conclusion is evident.
Start with QCOM. It has been followed for almost as long as the thread has existed. Evidence of its gorilladom has been presented frequently and strongly, and the thread creators, Frank and Lindy, held it exclusively. No stock has been more central to this thread than QCOM, yet for quite a few people it is a minor holding, and for a couple its not even in their portfolios.
On the other hand, despite the lack of positive posts for MSFT and INTC both are more widely held than most other stocks. And many, many stocks that have received much attention and strong support on this thread are nevertheless absent from most portfolios presented. For example, Cha2 has presented his 3 stock game more than a dozen times here, and it shows incredible performance. The #3 stock in that portfolio, SFE was mentioned favorably on this thread and the Godzilla thread many times by people like Teflon and myself. Just about every post was favorable and yet hardly anyone has bought SFE. A similar fate has befallen stocks like CTXS, SNDK and VISX. I was especially surprised by the lack of CTXS holders.
I also think that anyone who reads the thread for any length of time will see the high levels of disagreement. Just about every premise is challenged, and even the stocks with the most agreement, such as QCOM, still garner insightful contrarian posts. And anyone who has ever nominated a stock here has felt the bruises of rebuttals that always follow.
As Lindy pointed out, any time a group comes together it is because of some commonality. We are not a random cross section of humanity here. We share certain unique traits:
1. we are investors
2. we invest in individual stocks
3. we have Internet access
4. we believe in technology stocks so strongly that we joined an organization called Silicon Investor
5. we read a book called the Gorilla Game and instead of tossing it aside as so much fluff, we made it a key part of our investment philosophies
6. we read, and react to this thread
So yes there are agreements here about certain issues - that's not surprising, but that does not mean we have succumbed to group think. If 20 smart Europeans were sitting around discussing the world in 1502 and 19 of them agreed that the world was round, it would have been foolish to discount their conclusions on the basis of group think.
Now having said that, I hope everyone agrees with me <g>.
StockHawk |
