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Thanks for your reply, Daniel, and I'm glad to hear that you are not JD in disguise, and that all points of view are welcome on this forum. Unfortunately, I did pick more of his losers than his winners, although I did buy some CCR and SEIC and other stocks that are still in the postive column at this writing which I still hold. Granted, some of his stocks have done well, but overall I am way in the red on his recommendations. Part of the reason is that to ease the pain of the price declines in stocks like Fletcher Forest and Pokphand, I bought more of those on the way down (on his strong recommedation) and it just compounded the losses. Yes, everyone is entitled to make mistakes, but I think you are going way too easy on Dessauer. My beef is not that he is wrong some of the time (he is entitled to be) but rather that he seems to be totally indifferent to the riskiness of his advice. It's not just that his picks have been lousy, but that his whole method of investing is fundamentally unsound. For example, I remember before the Asian Flu started in Thailand, he said that the last thing investors have to worry about is a stock market crash because there are over 6 billion more people in the world who are free to pursue their economic dreams. And, as I'm sure you know, he has said it many times since then. But, that's just a mantra, Daniel; and when you think about it, it's really stupid to direct your investments whistling a tune like that. It's useless. Investing isn't about clinging to platitudes. On a practical level, it's about locking in gains and minimizing losses. JD has not minimized losses nor has he locked in gains. Look at STD, one of the stocks you mentioned as one of his winners. He was just bragging about it recently in the August issue, but since then it has lost half its value. No matter how much he liked the stock, he knew it had a big run up, and if he didn't want to sell it outright, he could have advised placing a stop-loss underneath it. A second-rate broker would have had enough sense to advise you to do that much. Fortunately, I did place stop-losses under Comshare and PMRX before they went down, so I was able to preserve modest profits in those stocks by going against his advice. But what the heck, Daniel? He's supposed to be the experienced expert. Contrary to what you said, his letter is not just a list of "stock possibilities". It consists of explicit buy and sell recommendations cloaked in blue-sky optimism and "trust me" confidence. You know, Dan, he never told us that we had to be "savvy" to apply his advice. How were we supposed to know how much of our funds to invest "wisely" (as you suggest) when he kept telling us month after month, hotline after hotline, to put all of our money into his stocks, to "remain fully invested"? Are you saying that we should have known enough to take that part of his advice with a grain of salt? Believe me, I wish to God I had called up Vanguard and bought their S&P index fund. At least their prospectus would have provided an honest appraisal of risk, which is more than you can say for that Pied Piper, John Dessauer. |
