Hi John,
I tend to disagree with your posts suggesting that the entire Gorilla game is useless. I do disagree with how the Gorilla Game was practiced and promoted on this thread, but that is just a matter of personal preference and opinion rather than any specific kind of right or wrong. I found the book and many of the posts over the years regarding how high tech markets grow and develop useful and interesting. I think the hunt for hi tech companies with sustainable competitive advantages is worth it, and suspect that the market will offer up opportunities from time to time to purchase dominant technology companies, or companies on their way to becoming dominant technology companies, at prices that incorporate reasonable risk reward propositions. (And of course, to a large extent "reasonable" is in the eye of the beholder.)
What was particularly irksome to me over the years, however, were posts like these, #reply-14486132, which put a 400 billion dollar market cap price target on SEBL, implying a 854% appreciation which in turm implied that the then current market price of $111 per share was a steal (SEBL now languishes at 6 billion market cap), and posts like these, #reply-15352606, which suggested that one had a good shot of doubling the performance of the S&P 500 in the long run no matter what price one paid for these companies. Four years has gone by and the S&P performance still far exceeds the subsequent performance of the two companies referred to in that post, if you bought at the prices mentioned in the post. Imo, we could have used you, Jurgis and the many other passer bys that had an interest in trying to identify a value of a company as it related to the core performance of the business rather than basing valuation on current market sentiment and market momentum trends. Unfortunately, however, nearly everyone that had a conservative valuation bias ended up in the doghouse.
Nevertheless, I don’t envy Frank for having the thankless job of trying to lead the thread, and I appreciate that a thread can’t be all things to all people. I think if you ever thought about being in Frank’s shoes, you might imagine how difficult it must be to keep discussions moving ahead over the years in a cordial, productive manner. The difficulty of Frank's job didn't occur to me until only recently. It really is kind of a tough management problem. So my suggestion is that you tone it back down again and go back to the JS you were before you were enticed in to coming back out swinging with your recent spate of posts. <ggg>
I look forward to reading some more company specific analysis from you in the future. I am still waiting for that SEBL update you promised us #reply-18920216, even though I am personally convinced that SEBL is not a Gorilla. I am sticking to a basic rule that in order for a company to be even considered for eligibility as a Gorilla, it at least has to have demonstrated the ability to produce positive Core Earnings as defined by S&P as opposed to only have demonstrated the ability to produce earnings financed by shareholder dilution.
JMO, Huey |
