That sounds like a typical blogger: can't stand the heat, but still feel compelled to share their cooking with the rest of the world. Bloggers. Never before in human history have so many people with so little to say had so much free time to say so much to so few.
Agree 100% w/the above sentiment about TKR and about hating interference in your trading patterns. It's his site .... he can run it as he thinks is best ... but he made it clear a year ago why he stopped posting his trades. I'm sure some folks got torked and quit the site - but I posit those who left (or left "pissed") were more day/swing-trader types and weren't looking at long-term timeframes for their positions. But he made it quite clear what he was doing about his trades/record and why. Each to their own! FYI I have been a TKR subscriber for a few years and never joined for "stock picks" but rather the objective commentary, links, and analysis, which I find down-to-earth, regularly insightful and often useful. My own 2 cents to kick off the new year.
Amen to that! Imagine when the ny times and all other real news media go bust we will be saved by the intrepid,insightful bloggers of the world!Not that none of them know much about journalism,ethics or law or have an editor. Just an endless stream of consciousness. Even that paper trader ass, riskfreetrading has a blog!
When I look at Kirk site I got the sense he was a very patient and disciplined investor. One of the benefits of posting the results is knowing "proof was in the pudding". This was very different than others. I no longer go to his site and would be less likely to now. I sent him one question once and he was very kind to reply.
After his recent redesign of his site, it looks like he's saying that he's beaten the market every year of his career. He also includes stats from 2000-2007. Every year is positive and the arithmetic mean is around 33%. The performance link is buried deep in the middle of this section. http://www.kirkreport.com/aboutme.html But he doesn't include info from 2008 and 2009, nor does he say that he's been positive every year of his career. That leads me to believe that he was probably negative in 2008. Ok. So his numbers appear to be pretty respectable. Not exactly blowing the doors off the market, but respectable enough. Here is where it gets bizarre: "My personal trading goal is to produce 1% per day, 5% per week of income in my personal trading portfolio after all expenses, taxes, and fees. I meet that target frequently, but certainly not always." "Certainly not always" is a litotical understatement . . Compounding 5%/week would lead to astronomical numbers. His results in 2005-7 were under 20% for three years in a row, and there's reason to believe he lost money in 2008. When reality and your goals are so far apart, you might want to rethink the goals. The other alternative is deluding yourself, which Kirk appears to have chosen. Kirk's goal is daily - not monthly or quarterly- profitability. Yet he's not even close, which means he's setting himself up for daily frustration. Maybe daily profitability is not a realistic or practical goal . . . and is leading to overtrading. Back when he published his results, he would make dozens of tiny trades a week which didn't affect his p&l in the slightest. He would do things like buy on a pullback to a moving average. At other times he would put 30% of his account in one stock. He made a big trade in Baidu the day it came out for a large gain. Same in TZOO when that stock was getting squeezed. Most of his gains in 2003 (up 85%) came from a JBLU long (from $12 to $30) and USNA, two positions he had researched heavily and where he put big positions on. My point here is that 80% of his gains came from 2% of his trading . . . He would have been much better off sticking to the home runs and ignoring the daily scratches where he had no edge. He seems to be like a lot of traders who want trading to be more like a job with a steady income. In the immortal words of the trading god Lescor, just "grinding it out day after day, putting on the hard hat and heading into the coal mines" . . .
As you can probably tell, I made a close study of Kirk's trading while he was still publishing his trades.
I studied this guy a little bit as he has a lot of positive reviews and interviews with well known people in the industry eg Peter Brandt or Mark Minervini. I must say that it seems to me that something is fishy here. For example, he states on his website that he trades a $9mil portfolio. Last time when he published his stats at the end of 2007 it was around $1mil. 8-Year cumulative performance (2000 to 2007): +262% He wants us to believe that 2008-2014 performance is more than 3 times better ? hm... Another thing, he says that he has more than 7k members. If that's true, that would explain in part his $9mil portfolio. But I have doubts about that too. He publishes a free weekend magazine with the number of readers usually under 1k. You would expect to have more than 7k hits every week, right ? (his members + various people just like me).
Just a general thought: Whoever is behind the magic elixir marketing program had the need to find an income source other than trading, so what are the odds that they are able to trade profitably?