Rich, the only reason to actually leave is if you find no value in the board. One can get enormous value from a board just reading and never posting. One can stick in the odd bit of humor and be appreciated most places. The only issue comes in when you have a stock idea that you would like a board to respond to. Different boards have different profiles and people who are interested in that board hang out there. E.g., Value Hounds has an obvious clear focus. It would be silly to post a highly speculative stock that was overvalued by traditional metrics to Value Hounds. So, if you are interested in a particular company, pick the board that fits.
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Hi Tamhas,
Rich, the only reason to actually leave is if you find no value in the board. One can get enormous value from a board just reading and never posting. One can stick in the odd bit of humor and be appreciated most places. The only issue comes in when you have a stock idea that you would like a board to respond to
You seem to have a keen grasp on what stocks are Saul type stocks so I went back through your posts and have not seen one write up on any Saul type stocks. Only a bunch of posts telling people what they can and can not post on Saul’s board. So I would ask you to please show me one of your write up’s on Saul’s type of stocks that I may study and find interesting.
Thank you,
Andy
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Who claimed to be anything but a learner?
Rich, reading your posts is so crazy. I go along with it, and start reading and then I get to paragraph 7 – and it starts to get strange… then I read the rest and then I see — oh, it’s Rich!!!
It all starts to make sense.
Then I read it again and I see what you are saying and you are clever.
It is always good to see you Rich!
Happy Holidays!!
Karen
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I mean, you were spoofing KMI, right? I think I got the joke, unless I didn’t…
Karen
I have a sense of humor!
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I mean, you were spoofing KMI, right? I think I got the joke, unless I didn’t…
Whew Karen, Thanks for confirming what I was thinking. After everyone, including Rich, started talking about the stock I thought dang he was serious and I probably hurt his feeling with my grandfather story.
I think the wheels came off my wagon lately because I am getting tired of everyone just beating up on people on this board lately.
Remember this post?
http://discussion.fool.com/ot-be-kind-and-tender-with-each-other…
That made me proud to be a member.
Now Rich’s post, while Saul might not invest in it. Could be used as a teaching moment for everyone. The people that were interested in discussing in it could teach something to all of us. I just do not want anyone run off the board when they actually put forth the effort to bring something for all of us to look at. The post actually took time to compose and to study. That should be worth something. Rich has brought value to this board, maybe some people do not recognize some of his posts on this board. Here is one of his Post of the Day.
http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/tiny-blips-and-corrections/106435…
Read it, it received 19 recs on the post of the day board. That is like 200 recs on any regular board.
I do not have any say on how this board is run nor do I want to. I just want a board that I can come to and discuss stock ideas. That is what I thought I had found at Sauls. If every time i write up a stock and have to worry about it being a Saul stock, well then why write them up? I bring them here to bring them here for discussion. I do not post them all over. Sometimes only on Saul’s board, just for discussion. But I am sure I could take any of those posts to the value board and they wouldn’t run me off. Maybe they wouldn’t say anything but I think a couple of them would discuss it with me.
I have been thinking of posting less on all the boards because I have been getting into arguments with people lately and it takes away from my investing, learning, and time. I have been really busy at work lately because people have been going out, holidays, Short term disabilities, and retirements. So I haven’t as much time to put into looking at stocks. That’s my excuse for being a curmudgeon lately.
So I would like to apologize to everyone, especially you Tamhas
I should just learn to keep my mouth shut sometimes.
So to finish this post off. Anyone have any interesting stocks to look at?
Happy Holidays.
Andy
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Well, thank you Andy and I apologize in return for anything that may have ticked you off.
For me, there were two issues about the BOFI discussion. One was that it was taking up a lot of bandwidth on the board while clearly no longer qualifying as a Saul stock since Saul had dumped it. Given that there is an active BOFI board, it seemed sensible to move the conversation there. But, the other issue was that it didn’t remain positive and pleasant. It got downright nasty at spots. Now, if there are discussions here which don’t interest me, I can just skip over them. But this nastiness ruins the whole tone of the board. Moreover, it was mostly overreaction, i.e., reading someone else’s post and finding things that weren’t actually there.
As for posting about various stocks, I think it is clear that one of the organizational principles of TMF … and every other similar set of discussion boards … is that boards are created with a specific purpose in mind so that people who are interested in that purpose can follow exchanges which are of interest to them and avoid at least many exchanges which are not of interest. Someone created Value Hounds because they were interested in value investing, so one really should be talking about value investing when posting there. Posting on some highly speculative high tech stock is just off topic.
Now, not all of us are clear about all of these things up front. So, someone might post a stock here because it interests them and they don’t yet know a lot about it. But, I would expect that when it becomes clear that the stock doesn’t fit here, that one would take the discussion somewhere more appropriate rather than to continue on and on about the stock here. I don’t actually think this has been a big problem. Whether or not BOFI should be considered off topic for the board at this point, the problem with the thread was the tone and the vehemence, leading to far more posts than were really necessary to cover the substance.
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Awww Rich,
It has taken me 20 minutes to try to figure out if your post was serious or not – so yes I went and looked at a quote for STB and tried to figure out the number of shares outstanding, and then just realized I need to look at the market cap.
That’s the beauty of your posts – they sometimes go over my head and then I have to puzzle them out a bit, and then I still don’t know whether I understood or not. But I like it, it’s fun!
The short cut is to say – this post is by Rich, of course there’s a joke in it!
But is he serious about some of it? I never can quite tell. I can understand that someone who is not very patient could get frustrated, but then other people are very intrigued and entertained.
Anyway, I don’t know what is going on, but I enjoy whatever it is you are doing. And we miss you at Pro, by the way!
Karen
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The short cut is to say – this post is by Rich, of course there’s a joke in it!
But is he serious about some of it? I never can quite tell.
That is the part of the aura of the mystique of the paradox of Rich.
Is he joking? Yes. Of course. It’s Rich!
Is he also serious? Hmm, that is the question.
Like when he says he judges the worthiness of an argument of a Seeking Alpha contributor by their spelling and grammar.
Or this post, which eerily resembles my trading practices and is my favorite all-time post of anything ever posted on the internet:
http://discussion.fool.com/as-we-discuss-sauls-approach-to-buyin…
- Matt
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That was an amazing post. 
Thanks for sharing it.
And see, if Rich is buying a bus company and taking it private, I kind of want to get in on it, just because I like Rich so much. And that is sort of like buying a company that Saul likes because I like Saul… did Rich plan this reaction?
I think he might have. But I cannot be sure.
Anyway, my 7 year old wants to Google for more ideas for his Christmas gifts. Gotta go!
Karen
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Hi Tamhas,
For me, there were two issues about the BOFI discussion. One was that it was taking up a lot of bandwidth on the board …
For good reason! Saul had previously held it as his largest position. Many board participants had taken large positions of their own, based at least in part on Saul’s analysis of the company. If most everyone owns XYZ, then XYZ is going to take up a lot of bandwidth. If you happen to be one of the few who doesn’t own XYZ, then all this discussion on XYZ may annoy you, but given the constraints of the board, that’s just the way it works.
… while clearly no longer qualifying as a Saul stock since Saul had dumped it.
Ah! Now that is an interesting point, and I touched on that in my post upthread. You are saying that Saul stocks are only those stocks which Saul actually owns, and further implying that we may only talk about Saul stocks, i.e. stocks that Saul owns. That would limit board participants from bringing any new ideas that Saul does not yet own, and would also punish board participants who had invested in ideas that were Saul stocks at one time but no longer are simply because Saul chose to sell them, even if his reasons for selling are based on something less than a fundamental analysis of the company. It may be the same company and still meet Saul’s screening criteria (1YPEG etc), but just because Saul decided he doesn’t want it anymore, those who followed his lead earlier to buy it are now hung out to dry.
As a matter of board protocol, you, or Saul, or whoever else is responsible for framing the discussions here can do whatever you like; speaking for myself, as someone who has been mostly a consumer and not a contributor, the idea that we can only talk about stocks that Saul actively owns would only seem to lower the value of the board. It also does not encourage me (and probably many others who would be far more valuable contributors than me, e.g. Rich) to change our status from consumer to contributor. So, while as I said, you are welcome to frame the discussions however you like, the way you are suggesting it be done amounts to biting your nose to spite your face.
the other issue was that it didn’t remain positive and pleasant.
Yes, and who is responsible for setting the tone around here to make sure it stays positive and pleasant? I would say the onus is on Saul, as curator of the board, to keep the discussion objective and positive and stripped of the highly charged emotions (FUD) that the short sellers are hoping to instill in shareholders. But he didn’t do that— his response to the short attacks was first to jump back and forth in and out of the stock, express consternation that other board participants found his behavior bewildering and unhelpful, and finally shut down completely and refuse to talk about it, coming up for air only when he found more things to worry about on Seeking Alpha.
I learned a lot about BOFI over the past several weeks from folks like BlazerMania, NewEchota and others. They have done some good, solid work looking for the real facts in this fog of war situation, and they deserve many thanks for sharing that information.
Rob
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I learned a lot about BOFI over the past several weeks from folks like BlazerMania, NewEchota and others. They have done some good, solid work looking for the real facts in this fog of war situation, and they deserve many thanks for sharing that information.
Hey Rob, this board is a nice place to hang out and learn. I hope that you are enjoying it here and I might blame myself for mentioning Saul’s board over at Pro and bringing all you smart Pro guys over here to check the place out. You know when you get a lot of smart people together sometimes it works and it’s cool and sometimes people want to out smart each other, and it’s a distraction or it gets ugly.
This is a cool place. I am still sorting out how any of it fits in to what I am doing, but I like the resource and I really appreciate Saul for creating the space and putting his energy into getting it going and keeping it going with his very regular contributions.
Not everything is going to be perfect but I’m more than happy to sift through an abundance of talk then to have nobody talking and fewer ideas to consider.
I hope you have a really good time here going forward and that everybody gets along well because the friction between members is a hangup that prevents the community effort.
Be cool. See you on the boards!
Karen
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P.S. I really loved the conversation between you and Neil re: Oracle. That was such an interesting and great discussion!! --Karen
You are saying that Saul stocks are only those stocks which Saul actually owns,
Well, this is largely moot since Saul himself has pretty much opened the door, but no, I never had any intention of suggesting that Saul had to own it in order for it to be a Saul stock. To me, it would be any company which showed strong growth and which was undervalued by the market relative to the strength of that growth … as a start. But, there are a number of characteristics of a company … not necessarily a fixed list … which would then kick a stock which qualified on the basic metrics out of contention. People have used phrases like “growth at a reasonable price”. Myself, I find this meaningful because it makes it different than growth, value, dividend, etc. that people use as a reason to focus on a particular category of stocks.
But, clearly, the real problem with the BOFI threads is that they did not maintain the courtesy and politeness which generally characterizes the conversation around here. Given that this is not a moderated board, Saul can’t actually enforce any such standard … only the community can.
One of the things which people seem to fail to recognize is that Saul is human. He appears to be better than many of us at not becoming emotionally attached to a purchase so that he is more prepared to change his mind when it appears the thesis has changed, but that doesn’t mean he is a machine. He has every right to be indecisive and vacillate at times as I am sure we all do. He also has the right to take umbrage when his motivations are called into question. And, yet, as he posted, he has a long history of being unsure of BOFI, getting surges of confidence and excitement interrupted by periods of question and concern … and he stuck with them for quite a while until that concern finally became too great. So, he briefly second guessed that decision and then got a stronger conviction. I, for one, am happy to see this because it makes me feel less bad about my own periods of indecision.
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Tamhas,
I never had any intention of suggesting that Saul had to own it in order for it to be a Saul stock.
But in a previous post you wrote:
One was that it was taking up a lot of bandwidth on the board while clearly no longer qualifying as a Saul stock since Saul had dumped it.
So… which is it?
Rob
Having now made my position as clear as I can, can we drop it?
Oh my, what did I stumble into. I’m several hundred posts behind, so I’m not sure what I’ve missed, but clearly some fireworks.
Rich is a satirist, humorist, philosopher and darn sharp person, so the fact that he has been exiled or exiled himself does not bode well.
John
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