I don't agree. Brinker went against the crowd and "buy-and-hold sponsors" in January 2000.
If you've listened to his show over the years, his most regular sponsors are his own newsletters. Most of his competitors, those selling financial advice to managed accounts, books and newsletters like Bond and Edelman, buy their own air time and pitch their services. Brinker is entertaining, nothing better than bashing the bears as Cassandras at damn near the top in the 1400s, so he got ABC to pay for the air time.
Brinker has the bullish market timer to sell when people were buying stocks. He brought out the fixed income advisor, using his son's name to not have the portfolios averaged with his marketimer portfolios, so he had a newsletter to advertise should the market tank while he was bullish. Note that shortly after this "backstop" was in place, he decided to end the secular bear market talk. Note too this was also the time they blurred the once clear distinction between who owned what newsletter.
If anything, you could make the case he hoped he was right about the market going up since he made more selling the Marketimer than the Fixed income Advisor, but he was set to advertise whatever works via praise from callers on his show going forward.
One snag in the plan is he didn't stick to CDs and treasuries in what should have been a slam dunk in a bear market... he got fancy with high yield garbage (junk bond funds) and it seems those caused his fixed income Advisor portfolios to tank recently.
Your mistake was thinking he cared about you the subscriber more than his income stream from selling newsletters and managing accounts over $100,000 for up to 2%.
BTW, if Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, didn't see it coming to the point he was investing MILLIONS of his own money in GE stock in the $30s, or Robert Rubin, architect of the Clinton Administration boom who is co-director at Citigroup, then I doubt some radio clown who once sold annuities at a bank 30 years ago knew or understood what was happening ahead of those men. The ONLY non permabear I know who saw it coming was Warren Buffett who called financial derivatives "weapons of financial destruction." Even so, Warren didn't sell his BRKA holdings as his belief is we'll do OK in the long run. |
