this isn't paradise
JMHO, but I thing UF and MB have been too gentle with you. It is a testament to the community here that everyone has responded to Apollo's second question with unsparing frankness, opening themselves up in the process to jibes from all and sundry. Piling on when people are down is not a particularly classy act, and you and Mr. Senior have salted the wounds of others rather freely.
Not paradise? No $hit, Sherlock, and guess what, that guy in the red and white suit whose lap you're sitting on doesn't live with elves. The thread may not be perfect, but given the target audience, it's as honest and supportive an environment as one could hope for, and infinitely more sensible and informed than the vast majority of investing resources out there. SI members are rarely total novices. Despite significant cross-pollination, this is not an outpost of the Fool, and has never tried to be (although the thread FAQ is Foolish indeed). What Frank and the others have created here instead is sort of a one-room school house for high school through graduate school, where intermediate to advanced tech investors can swap ideas and experiences and fine-tune one particular strategy they have found extremely useful.
"On this thread I see plenty of talk about margin, options and market timing." Like where? Margin users are generally chastened, options users are generally mocked, and market timers are generally shown the door with more or less politesse.
"People fussing and fuming because they didn't sell QCOM at 200 - or buy it all back at 55." Your spare profile says that you joined SI in February. (Mr. Senior, he who questions the reality of the team spirit here, unsurprisingly has no profile at all.) So perhaps you weren't in Q before the run. If not, then it may be hard to recapture the excitement and headiness of those bygone days, and how people got a bit addled, and how passionate the triumph and bitter the fall really was (and how glorious the resurrection is and will continue to be). Anyway, I'd cut some slack for the real Qtips, because they're a special breed.
"LEAPs as long-term investments." This is a topic that has been debated at length a number of times, with one of the most respected of thread members (if you ignore Citrus) consistently pointing out his disagreement. Moreover, just what long-term means in the tech world is a valid question, given the rapidity of the TALC these days, and it can be argued that 30 months might qualify.
"People jumping to buy stocks as if Project Hunt was the gold standard." Well, on average they're more informed than practically all articles in the financial press and more sincere than practically all broker's reports. So as a start for one's own DD, I'd say they look pretty good to me. And where else would you find people putting vast amounts of work into such projects and freely admitting that their objects of attention didn't clear the top bar? I wish we had a lot more Hunt Reports, actually--one on a formerly hot SCM company comes to mind in particular--and I'd like to see your own efforts put forward for thread dissection. Those who bought did so at their own risk; some have profited and some haven't, and all have learned in the process.
Anyway, no point in belaboring the issue, and I probably shouldn't be so defensive because the thread is full of big boys and girls. But after reading every single post here along with several tens of thousands elsewhere, on top of thousands of pages of non-E books, the feelings I have for the thread and its denizens are above all else respect and gratitude.
tekboy/Ares@R-E-S-P-E-C-Tfindoutwhatitmeanstome.com |
