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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (3190)	7/24/2003 11:51:28 PM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

russell, as i have complained in the past, tends to take credit sometimes where he deserves none or exaggerate. i won't rehash it, but i could with documentation. i read him for two things: the occasional insight from 50 years of market watching and because he has 10,000 readers more or less... perhaps more with all the sharing I assume goes on and library copies of the letter.

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (3190)	7/25/2003 4:06:37 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

Hi Darfot, i often wonder how they figure these things. At one time, I subscribed to Hulbert's Financial Digest, minimum subscription length, maybe a year or two. For someone who's never seen the "record" on newsletters and other forms of media that have recommended portfolios or individual stock selections, the Digest was a real eye-opener. To start, the vast majority of these writers actually loose money for their subscribers, presuming that the subscriber rabidly follows and obeys all selections. That fact aside, Hulbert has proprietary methods for determining what constitutes a buy recommendation or a sell recommendation, what is or isn't recommended for a portfolio allocation, etcetera... He discloses just enough information to allow the reader to know that the process is as objective as the Digest can make it, with subjectivity avoided (were it possible). There are formulas, and stuff like that. However, I agree with you somewhat. If a writer says something along the lines of "I like IBM", is that a recommendation or merely filler material for the newsletter? One thing that was interesting for most newsletter writers is that they often tell their subscribers what to buy, when to buy it, what price range is "fair", and which brokerages would offer discounts (if any) on the buy. But very few told their subscribers when to sell. So how does the Digest determine the exit point? so it is kind of strange for Hulbert to give this precise, "risk-adjusted" return over multiple decades The risk-adjusted return analysis was perhaps the best part about the Hulbert subscription. Basically, what the Digest attempts to do is to determine which newsletters got big returns by taking big risks, versus the newsletters that got maybe only decent returns but with far less risk involved. Each subscriber had to decide for himself/herself what level of risk they were comfortable with, and then could concentrate their reading on the part of the newsletter that dealt with speculation instead of say blue chips. Overall, the best thing I ever learned from Hulbert's was that Value Line is perhaps the single best subscription investment a small investor can make. The caveat there though is that, unlike most investment newsletters, Value Line is not something you read in one setting in the bathroom and then go buy some stock on the computer. Value Line actually requires that you know a little something about fundamentals and investing before jumping all over their latest recommendations. KJC