Subject: Re: Dealraker made a point worth contemplating: "
dealraker,

Most of your posts are anecdotal, about the great success you had investing in this or that stock decades ago. They don't provide much rationale on why you invested in them then or whether they are worth buying today. But they do offer ideas to investigate further. I discovered EWBC from one of your posts and started a position recently after the regional bank crisis. And I do recommend some of your posts, just not the ones in which you rant about Jim getting more recs than you or being wrong on this or that stock.

Jim on the other hand offers lots of data and reasoning in his posts, so I find them very interesting and educational. Because of my tax situation, I do not trade options or sell positions with large capital gains. Nor do I try to implement Jim's 'mechanical investing' screens, as I don't have the temperament to hold lots of stocks and trade them frequently. But they are still teach me a lot about valuation. Sure, some of the 'value' stocks Jim wrote about like BPY, Alliance/Bread have turned out to be cigar butts, but then Buffett too has had many failures like airlines, KFT, USG, Tesco and many mediocre banks. But Jim explains his ideas with lots of data, projections and qualitative discussions on the business and how he arrives at an intrinsic value. And all for free. This is what I find very interesting, even if I implement very few of his ideas.