Phil Town

Reality Bites

About a year ago Phil Town had a really fun argument on Maria Bartiromo's show, on the steps of the Federal Reserve Building with a mutual fund apologist from Kiplinger.  The market was off a rather sudden 500 points at 14,000, and he was pitching the same old "buy & hold" snake oil while I was arguing that there was a significant sell-off in an over-priced market that was going to take your mutual fund down and your retirement with it. 

He basically accused me of wild speculation.  I accused him of willful ignorance in the face of clear evidence that institutions were getting out.  It was like he couldn't hear me.  Like I was speaking English and he was only able to understand Greek. 

The fact is that we were speaking two different languages.  I was speaking the language of value.  He was speaking the language of efficient market theory, or EMT.  In a perfect world like the one Ivy League intellectuals live in, people are stalwart and rational.  In that world, I would agree with him.  But we don't live in that world.  Unfortunately, your fund manager thinks we do.

NTRI's Moat

Some of you wanted to know if I'm in (or have been in) NTRI. Here's the comment I left on the blog a little earlier today:

I'm not an owner of NTRI, gang. I don't know the diet business well enough to make a call on the moat. I have students who are trading this thing and have just killed it so I used this as an example in the talk I do to show how important the arrows are, even if you think you have a wonderful business at a great price. And it really is a great example.