This post is in response to your post to ID on the Moderated thread. #reply-19442491
My repeated comment in March 2000 that most stocks discussed in the folder were overvalued was also apparently unhelpful to you.
Imo, the oft stated comments from you like this one above are misleading, and an argument can well be made that this is revisionist history. Perhaps your overvaluation comments were unhelpful because at the same time that you were making occasional warnings that stocks may be overvalued in the short term, you were also promoting the same stocks as being undervalued in the long run with both fists pumping---imo. For example, how could a poor newbie read this Sept 2000 post from you with its 400 billion dollar market cap target and implicit $949 share price target for SEBL by year 2009, and not be encouraged to walk away with the conclusion that the then share price of $111 per share was undervalued for the long run? Who wouldn’t be satisfied with their share price going up 8x in eight years? Or how about your many posts suggesting that buying a Gorilla at a short term top would not preclude folks from significantly outperforming the market in the long run?
Here is your post with the implicit $949 share price target for SEBL:
Message 14486132
These kinds of posts from the past would not be worth dragging up, and would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, except that imo, open and honest dissenting opinions regarding valuation at the time were actively discouraged on the thread. When outsiders showed up suggesting that there wasn’t any serious valuation work going on here, you always coughed, then answered in a bug huff that valuation work had been going on here all along. But many of those people felt that assuming huge forward growth and putting wild PSRs on companies like you did for SEBL was not serious valuation, nor was your putting high PEGs on questionable pro forma earnings growing at unsustainable rates (your preferred method before you discovered FCF). Nearly everyone with a more conservative value bent than you was driven away, discouraged from openly posting about the high valuations, sent to the doghouse or put on ignore.
At the same time, attention to your posts as a bar for valuation was heavily self promoted by both you and UF, and therefore re-examination and attention to these past posts from time to time after the fact is now fair game. Your constant references to your past "overvaluation warnings", invites examination of a wider set of your past posts to add perspective to these “warnings”. And your post with the $949 share price target for SEBL was made all the worse by your self description in one of your posts back then as a “traditional valuationist”. I still remember cringing when I read that self description, which imo, was very misleading.
We (including myself here) all provided some atrocious analysis here from time to time, but apparently some folks have such inflated egos they can’t admit it. So let’s not get too carried away with recasting thread history to keep reminding folks of the Buckley “overvaluation warnings”. Imo, your posts taken in entirety, as evidenced by the $949 price target for SEBL, clearly pushed a much more different and dangerous message.
JMO, Huey |
