How can it be a "verbatim" transcript when it includes phrases like "BB, raising voice to talk Mary down" (X2), "BB raising voice--shouting Mary down", " BB, loudly interrupting Mary", and "Mary, loudly trying to say something". Sorry, that's not verbatim. That's someone's personal summary. IMO, if you're going to write a verbatim transcript, make it verbatim and leave out the personal judgments. I'm not saying the rest of it is not verbatim, I don't know.
Aside from that, Brinker is not as clear as he might be, and I can understand why Mary might be frustrated. Reading it and studying it, it's much easier to see what he's saying than it would be on the telephone. But it seems clear to me that he's saying several things:
(1) QQQQ should not be in a balanced portfolio (if I was Mary, I'd ask myself, what's the solution, if I have Qs where they should not be, according to Brinker?);
(2) the couple can make their own decision about what they want to sell at this point. He's not comfortable with $38, but that's up to them;
(3) there's no reason why it has to be all one thing--if they need 400K, they're not going to get it all from selling their Qs anyway.
If I was Mary, I would hang up and say "Get rid of those !#$%^ Qs!". She's right about the capital gains thing. Sounds like she's already 90% on the idea. Bob's saying pretty strongly that they don't need to be in a balanced portfolio. If they watch the market and the world news at all, they know that Qs are not going back up to $55 anytime soon, certainly not before they need to raise the $400K.
Brinker's gun-shy about the Qs, no doubt about that. That's why he won't give her a clear "sell" or "don't sell", though he doesn't like to do that anyway. If he said "sell" or don't sell" and then they went the opposite direction, you bashers would see to it that he never lived it down and you'd holler for another ten or twenty years about the "devastating" advice he gave to poor Mary with the $3 Million and the $800K vacation home.
But the statement "Should this kind of deceptive practice be illegal? Obviously, it's immoral, dishonest and contemptible"-- is patently ridiculous. |
