langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-08-02-6

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comment-2002-08-02-6

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 7936 days AGO

To Chris' point: I would have more sympathy for your point of view if people like Mr. Saylor had devoted considerable time and energy to explaining how overvalued his stock was as it went up. And if he had installed proper and sensible accounting procedures and policies that prevented the booking of `profits' that were principally composed of `vapor' with the object of hyping that very stock price that you claim was not a part of his `exceptional management talent.' For the most part, they didn't bother---apparently being happy instead to `ride the wave'. IMO, if you choose to `ride the wave' you can't gripe if someone then blames you for crashing on the beach.

I must confess to not know the specific details of Mr. Saylor's performance, but I did have direct experience with some similar `smoke and mirror' companies that had stock prices in the multiple hundreds of dollars that now trade for multiple dimes. Much of the time the executives were too busy arguing about the decor of the Corporate Jets, arranging their purchases of `foreign' properties (vineyards were the vogue, at least for a while) and trading in their BMWs for Lamborghinis to devote much attention to developing sustainable sources of revenue for their companies. In the cases I know directly the managers are a peculiar and generally talentless lot, largely posessing skills that would have had them sell snake-oil if they had been born a century earlier.

The general point is that a performance like Mr. Saylor's surely does not add any _weight_ to his philosophy. At best, his history is such that if he were to write under a pseudonym and claim _no_ past history, then his ideas would stand or fall on their own merit. As it is, if he wants to have his past performance add `weight' to his words, then he _must_ be content to accept the _whole_ weight. If I understand your (Chris') argument correctly, then this guy is essentially someone who won a Stock Price Lottery, and I don't think I have much interest in taking systems advice or direction from lottery winners as a group.

So for me, either he was _not_ responsible for what happened, and therefore just another rrandom lottery winner, or he _was_ responsible for what happened, and it wasn't very pretty. In either case his history doesn't add much weight to his argument...