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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joshua Corbin who wrote (36867)	12/20/2000 11:48:03 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Joshua, Thanks for your balanced critique of the Motley Fool. That's what I was looking for all along -- balance that puts things in a reasonable perspective. I appreciate that you might think I'm defensive about the Fool, but a thorough search of my posts about their stuff will reveal that I'm as quick to constructively criticize their flaws as I am to applaud their strengths. As recently as in the last ten days I wrote a post criticizing the ending statement of a piece written by Ann Coleman, a person I greatly admire. Just to make sure my reputation for nitpicking is upheld, :) I want to add some clarity about O'Higgins's decision to stop using his own Beating-the-Dow method. It was on Memorial Day weekend probably four years ago that it came to Foldom's attention that he was abandoning his own system. Robert Sheard, the head of the Beating-the-Dow area of Fooldom at that time, had just left for vacation. He had asked that I, an official Fool volunteer at the time, "sit in" for him during his absence. I wrote a two-part piece in response to the news. I'm reasonably familiar with the circumstances though the details many years later may be foggy. You may not be aware that the reason O'Higgins stopped using his own method has nothing to do with the reason Fooldom advises not to use it. Instead, he decided to become a market timer. I'm not aware of his results this year, but my understanding of his results in his first two or so years of trying to time the market were dismal, so much so that he would have been far better off sticking to his Beating-the-Dow system. So let's not use his judgement as documentation of anything. In fact, the Fool extended O'Higgins's research going back about 20 years. After having conducted their internal study that led them to believe that they were unknowingly data mining, my guess is that they probably understand O'Higgins's data better than he does. You may not be aware, for instance, that when Randy Befumo (no longer with the Fool) did the initial pain-staking research that involved manually looking up data about all the DJIA stocks, he realized that there were errors in O'Higgins data. I don't agree with you about all of your recommended changes at the Fool, but I do believe they deserve strong consideration. Thanks again for the return to balanced, open minded commentary. --Mike Buckley