Caller Everett, in the first hour of the program, said: "I want to thank you for giving me the tools to, say what money that I have, I'm on disability through my company. But the year 2000 was incredible because that's when you said go to cash reserves and I did, and then people would sit there and look, geez do you listen to this guy, do you learn from this guy? And I'd say well you have to look at his track record. And then you're call back in March of 2003 was incredible because when people say you can't time the market. You study the market so much and you look for signs and when you see these signs coming up, you give a warning. It's incredible, I just want to thank you so much. I've saved some of my capital preservation. I'll be retiring next month and I'm transferring my funds from Fidelity to Vanguard. I'm going to be in that Active/passive portfolio. You're a great man and I really like listening to you. You take it easy. Have a good life."
Bob Brinker's replied: "Thank you, thank you very much for calling. I'm glad you're with us Everett. Thank you very much.......Let's get Greg on the line in San Francisco, California."
Honey EC: As you can see, Everett must have slept through the whole 2007-2009 mega-bear market that Brinker rode down fully invested, hollering buy, buy, buy all the way down. 8^)
It really stretches ALL CREDULITY to believe that after all these years have gone by with no mention of Brinker's year-2000 history, that Brinker would brag about having raising (65%) cash reserves in 2000, but never mention that he put up to half of that back into a QQQQ trade in October 2000. Then when it went south (total of -70%), he "decided" not to account for the trade at all in his "official record." His performance record has never been accurate since October 2000 because he took a mulligan on those cash reserves -- IOW: he used them two times. (But he pulled a very slick trick to cover up this trade, I will explain in a future post.)
Even Mark Hulbert, in Hulbert Financial Digest, uses an asterisk/footnote to account for Brinker's never-closed QQQQ-trade when he ranks Marketimer Model Portfolios. Regardless of the footnote:
In the November 2009 issue of Hulbert's Financial Digest, Bob Brinker's Marketimer is nowhere to be found on Mark Hulbert's "Total Return Ranking" or "Mutual Fund Letters" top 5 performers over the past 5 years.What Brinker said to Barbara Saturday [LINK], and Everett said to Brinker Sunday, was so far from the whole truth that it is SHOCKING to think that a radio talk show host, who sells himself as "America's most trusted financial advisor" on a national program, would be so deceptive. In the first place, he took an incredible leap going back to 2000 to "brag" about a market-timing move after having remained fully invested for the most recent (and much worse) mega-bear market -- mind boggling. In my opinion, only a shark would swim this low in the chum.
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Bluce said...Jim wrote: After reading Brinker's response to caller Barbara, it sounds like it does not really matter to him that he missed the bear market.
Jim, what disgusts me -- and I suspect most others -- about BB is his dishonesty.
During the '08-'09 market crash he did not TALK about it, would NOT ALLOW any questions about it to be aired, he completely IGNORED the entire event, instead talking about oil, energy, politics, etc., anything BUT the stock market.
I would never expect him, me, or anyone else to be perfect at anything, but his dishonesty about the entire bear market is why he has zero credibility with me.
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Bluce is absolutely correct that Brinker did not talk about the stock market as it was falling like a rock in 2008. If you look back through my 2008 summaries, you will see that week after week, I wrote that Brinker did not mention the stock market. I even commented that if aliens from outer-space should only listen to Moneytalk, they would not know the stock market existed.
Perhaps Brinker didn't have the courage to talk about it as the market dropped since his long-touted "Marketimer Timing Model©" had him as a raging bull at the beginning of the bear -- and as he admitted (once) on the air, did not forecast the bear market.
*Point of interest: The last time Bob Brinker mentioned his "Marketimer Timing Model© in his newsletter was in October 2008 -- over a year ago.
Thanks to Kirk Lindstrom for this chart. Please click to enlarge:
Oh fer crying out loud.
The first caller today (Sunday) HAS to be a paid shill.
This cannot be real. It was disgusting.