Dan, you are the one who is not being logical or objective. Obviously the selective application of Dessauer's advice could have produced extraordinary gains or extraordinary losses depending on what you bought and when. The only fair thing however is to do what Hulbert does and track everything and look at that outcome, and on that basis, Dessauer's advice has been nothing better than mediocre.
If you can't see that recommending a stock at $24 only to see it fall in short order to $7 counts as a mistake, a misjudgment, a miscalculation, then you are beyond the pale. If missing the entry point on the stock by 70% of the total value doesn't constitute a mistake, I don't know what does. It wasn't just that he was wrong about the buying price, he was wrong about the extent of the accounting fiasco, he was wrong about their pending acquisitions (they just paid $280 million to get out of one big deal that was pending). Is the stock going to recover to $24 and move higher than that someday? Well probably. But that's only because there aren't that many Pokphands in the world. Most corporations that are in trouble do straighten things out and recover. But in the meantime, there is the paper loss, there is the opportunity loss (the opportunity to have had the money working for you productively elsewhere while you are waiting for Cendant to just get back to $24). I'm sure LSI is going to get back to $32 someday too, but that doesn't mean that Dessauer wasn't dead wrong to urge people to get into the stock at that price either. I am amazed that you seem to be unable to figure this out.
So, even though subscribers know about the Wall Street Week portfolio and are wondering how he did, you think it's fine if he tries to keep them in the dark about it, when it suits his purpose. You think it's fine when he announces his new selections with the usual fanfare, bragging about his past successes, but leaving out the most recent results, which would surely have the most interest to readers. Let me tell you something Dan: the subscribers are entitled to know.
How dare I? I'll tell you how I dare. Words have meanings, Dan. He didn't say, "If you don't own Pokphand, I think this would be a good time to buy it." He didn't say, "Whether or not you already own it, I would buy shares in Pokphand" What he said was, "If you own Pokphand, then my advice is to buy more!" It means exactly what it says- not what you want it to mean. After all, are you a personal friend of his, to be able to speak for him, read his mind tell us what he really meant? Have you been talking to him? I'm beginning to suspect that you have.
Yeah, I remember that quote about making mistakes. But he was just speaking generally at that time. And he has had more than "relatively few" mistakes. Let me point out, for instance, that if he recommended stock X, stock Y and stock Z, and they all collapsed that would be three mistakes. But if he recommends stock X, stock X, and stock X at different times over a long period, and it collapses to nothing as Pokphand did, and he advises selling for coffee and donuts, how many mistakes does that count as?
I'm hearing from a lot of people via e-mail who agree with me, Dan, that Dessauer has let us down.
|
