Poet, my comments about the whole episode is the least that I could do!
During the time that I have lurked on SI, I have seen some fairly sordid stuff on various threads - but what I have not seen is a purportedly reputed member of SI take such a repugnant and indefensible position. If the guy had made an issue of posting private messages but at the same time deplored the conduct of the perpetrators it would not have been as bad. His convoluted reasoning in his response to Rose was pathetic. I am confident that if the same had been done to someone that he viewed as a friend he would have taken a different tack - and would have had an equally convoluted rationale for why he was doing so!
The amazing thing is that he posted this to you not so long ago:
Message 15066044
Like I said: with friends like him, who needs enemies
Frank's myopic focus on his interpretation of the confidentiality section of the TOU in the face of the
threat and innuendo that my husband and I faced has helped me understand why he remains so focused on the
strategy written in a book a few years ago, when the stock market was a very diferent place
His mindset about investing is flawed because his experience in the markets was garnered during the bull-market since 95; his experience prior to that by his own admission was sporadic. His post equating the QQQ to a money market fund is ample proof that his comprehension of some of the basics is a shade shaky, to put it mildly. Anyone, who would let huge profits in grossly over-valued stocks/market, remain unrealized especially in tax-sheltered accounts does not know what he is doing. I think that the gg'ers actually believed that they were bullet-proof because they owned gorillas!
Do you recall how UF/duf-fer would brag about how the GK index was down only x% on a particular day even though the Composite was down a lot more? We don't hear that very much any more, do we?
The G&K thread reminds me of Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; I don't know if you are familiar with it. It has to do with a famous battle where a mistaken order was given by the commander in charge which resulted in the slaughter of the soldiers who obeyed the command unquestioningly as they rode straight into the enemy cannons. I learned it in school years ago and so I am quoting from memory but it includes lines that go something like this, referring to the soldiers who went to their death:
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred.
The blind obedience to Moore's book, which after all was written only in 98, as if it were gospel is for me akin to the blind obedience of soldiers in Tennyson's poem - except that there is one big difference. Soldiers are expected to obey orders - but investors??
Please understand that I am not knocking the gorilla concept - I think that there is some sound thinking behind it but the bizarre approach that the G&K thread uses defies reasoning!
Ah well, to each his own! |
