On Blogs as Public Records
I read something worth sharing. It’s a comment to a post on Shai’s blog. In it, Bill of “Absolutely No DooDahs” wrote:
On blogs – not only are they private thinkpads, but public ones. Someday years from now, someone’s gonna look at these blogs, where we (some of us, anyway) go out on a limb, and either say “what a genius” or “what was HE smoking.” I know that I look back on what I’ve written, here and in other places, and try to learn from my incorrect assertions and appreciate my correct ones. If my ideas prove to be successful – the blog may make a heck of a resume. If not, well, I should keep my day job.
This is exactly right. I know you may want more in the way of stock picks, but that isn’t what this blog is about. I’m never going to be able to do some sort of “lighting round” here; nor, would any such segment be of use to you. I like to have good reasons for making any assertion. I also like to make them once and make them for the long run. So, when I said I thought SAFM was the better buy than PPC, you can and should hold me to that. When, on my podcast, I said I thought it was a good bet CRFT and VLGEA would outperform the market, I meant it. If I end up being wrong about those things, tell me. We’ll go over my mistake. Think of it as an autopsy. We’ll determine the cause of my error, and look to prevent it from creeping into our thinking in the future. When I decided I wanted to create this site, the first thing I did was scribble down a real simple “mission statement” in my notebook: Help you become a better investor.
Learning from my mistakes will help you become a better investor, so however unpleasant it may be for me, it’s a necessary part of this project. Don’t let me get away with anything. I don’t want this to be the kind of place where something is said and then just allowed to drift off into the ether of web. A long term investor needs a long memory.