The Justa and Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club Thread Message Board

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Pastimes : The Justa and Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club Thread

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Jan 15 4:00 PM EST

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To: Honey_Bee who wrote (5347)	7/5/2010 7:06:13 PM
From: marc ultra	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) of 10065

If unhappy past experiences with Bob's calls motivates you to spend time and effort to "expose" Brinker then so be it. Like you say it's not about you. To me it's all about one thing. Making money on my investments. I'd think that's true of most who spend a bunch of money on a financial newsletter or spend their weekends listening to a financial guy on the radio. So I don't have the luxury of spending my time just looking for things Brinker may have done wrong. I have to have some confidence that my market timing notions have some validity since no matter what kind of stock picker I may be the overall market will have a huge effect on my performance. So for me the issue is if not Bob, then who? If not Bob's long term market timing model than what? It's a very practical point when I say things need to be compared to their peer group or other products that accomplish your goal. When something doesn't work out that I had gained confidence in my inclination is not to instantly abandon it or bemoan how terrible it was. I try to analyze the issue and decide how it should affect my decisions in the future. After so many good calls that helped me make money I had to make decisions what it meant when Bob made mistakes like trying to call a short term trading rally in a bear market with the QQQ call and missing the 2008 bear. It was not going to make me a dime to be bitter about the call and the fact is I still needed some basis to my market opinion or I would just be a buy and hold investor which I don't like or I'd be out of the market. When I analyze things I believe the principles that Bob uses in his market timing involving such factors as valuation, the Fed and interest rates, the economy, sentiment and the money supply are all appropriate and very sound. They're also similar to what other fundamental market timers use such as Garzarelli or for that matter people like Ken Fisher who gives market advice and manages money for a lot of private wealth people. So since I'm not interested in technical analysis except in terms of thinking of areas of bottoms and retests, I look at these fundamental market timers and Bob frankly crushes them all based on calls over a long number of years. So I believe in the factors that Bob uses in his market timing. Because of that it didn't change my opinion about that one bit when he missed calling the horrendous 2008 bear. It was clear to me that the black swan events like the oil spike to $145 followed by the death blow of Lehman were not things the model would pick up. More importantly it's a matter of statistical probability of being right or wrong so it involves things like sensitivity, specificity and predictive value. If you make your model so sensitive that it could pick up something like 2008 it would be worthless because it would be constantly calling bears and missing much of any bull markets even though the market has a long term tendency to move higher over time. If you make it too specific it will miss calling a lot of market turns. So the goal of any market timing model is to have the best chance of calling major market turns while minimizing false alarm calls. Since my motive is strictly making money on my investments I didn't spend a lot of time moping but evaluated where we were after lehman. What I saw was an incredibly bullish scenario particularly once we had that final bear raid on the financials in March '09 sending us down to the 666 S&P low. When I looked at the fundamental factors that Bob uses and also expecting an economic recovery in the second half of 2009 by studying the panic of 1907, looking at leading indicators like the ECRI's and having Bob's analysis as a baseline I was able to aggressively participate on the huge bull that followed rather than being left at the station as I said elsewhere would happen to most. As for convincing "goobers and geezers" as you say I think Bob stays pretty conservative in telling people approaching retirement age that they should have a balanced 50-50 portfolio and also recognize their own risk tolerance. He's probably done more than anyone in helping people avoid scams and predatory brokers and insurance agents. Again if we want to talk about the radio Bob gives the most sound knowledgeable investment advice of anyone I've heard on the radio. It will appropriately go down in radio history as the greatest investment show ever. You will just never again see anyone on the radio who has that combination of having a radio background, having worked on Wall Street and managed money, have a great background in both fixed income and equities and is also an excellent market timer. But again I'm looking at this in terms of how Bob compares to alternatives, not how I can find something not perfect in what he says.

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