On "Hot Tips" - Part 1

I am spending some time thinking about investing this morning. Browsing around on the internet for some new materials to read. Need to get that part of my brain geared back up again (and need to slow the part of my brain that just wants to play limit poker for pennies down as well). Today's thought about this stuff is this - related to (as indicated in the subject heading above) "hot tips".

There are some famous investors who guard their investment ideas very, very jealously. This is understandable to me only to the extent that such investors have not yet taken all of the position they want to take at a particular point in time. By this I mean, that of course if there were people who would be interested to know what stocks I am picking (to date, please note, there are not - and thank goodness for them), and those people could learn that I have identified XYZ Corporation as a beaten-down stock that merits investigation as a possible value investing choice, well then it would be bad for me because presumably they would be more likely to purchase shares in XYZ than if they didn't know I was interested in it, and that might drive the price of XYZ shares up out of the "value" range. But once I've taken my position, it doesn't make any sense at all to me that investors continue to jealously guard their investment choices. On the contrary, it would seem to be more financially beneficial for investors to talk fairly freely about their investment choices after their position was established. Perhaps people would follow them in and drive up the value of their position. This would be a good thing.

One countervailing idea of course is that if people know what you're investing in, people can ascertain whether you're doing any good or not. And it's even possible people will want to reprimand or ridicule you for making a bad choice. So adding an emotional element to the investing game. And it has been demonstrated that emotions are anathema to sound investment decisions.