Herbalife is a hidden tax on the poor

I am following the media discussion about Bill Ackman's attack on Herbalife as well as the company's stock price with a lot  interest. Checking all the numbers and facts in Ackmann's presentation is beyond my capacity but intuitively and based on personal experience of some close friends and acquaintances I feel like this company deserves to be wiped out. Their primary sin is: wasting time of mostly underprivileged people or anyone having difficulty finding a job. Herbalife is one reason people who actually have nothing to do pretend being busy. Cause you know what: if you are not busy enough probably you should get busy getting acquainted with this great company - Herbalife. I tend to look leisurely and underprivileged most of the time so great career facilitators love to approach me. Ackman is right on the point: I never heard a single mention of the product the company sells, no powder, no pills. They go straight to the core. Build great career: become Supervisor, Grand Master, Mister Universe, whatever but no mention of magic powder to lose weight or clean your toilet, etc.. HLF representatives usually stay active until threatened by complete social isolation, because no one in their right mind would not buy a physical product from a company selling career opportunity. Who buys all those useless Herbalife boxes then?  I never bought them, but a friend of mine did, shortly before the purchase she had been disarmed by a story about some couple whose life had been a mess until they discovered Herbalife. Thanks to Herbalife they bought a yacht, a house, a Mercedes, etc. The  inventory purchased by my friend stood idle for several weeks until the impossibility of reselling it became so apparent as to compel a wish to justify the purchase by putting it to some good use. Good use it was. My friend took the pills, restricted her diet, jogged and did what people generally do when they are on Herbalife. Guess what? She gained some significant weight instead of losing it. Still it was good so because, if she had been less heavy she would had jogged to find this nouveau riche couple on their yacht and drown them in a see of tears. Now let us consider the practical issue: go long or short HLF? All the good reasons have already been listed elsewhere, I follow the advice of my granma: Whatever you do son, stay clear of Herbalife! As for Carl Icahn and other prominent investors going long Herbalife now, they probably never had to recruit people for Herbalife, because if they did, they would staying in line with their food stamps now instead of gambling on the continuous indifference of FTC.

Internal critic lashing out on information service providers

Stopped writing this blog several years ago due to a lack of readership. Checking back on it
later seemed very interesting so I decided to resume writing. The ideas I wrote down sound reasonable to myself still(may be I am completely deluded), some stocks (AIG, Compucredit) I thought could be profitable  would have been disasters if anyone have followed through with these ideas.(Fortunately no one visited these pages except some spammers posting porn links in comments).
What happened? AIG: I had no idea what these guys had on their books, I did not know they were selling credit default swaps on morgages, I have hardly heard about this animal at this time and did not understand what it means. Big professional investors with huge investigative resources  lost big time on it, the only thing protecting me against my ignorance was the total lack of funds. The credit crisis is not your average up and down of the stock exchange, but this is no excuse, I have to admit I had no idea what I was writing about and I am pretty sure I still have no idea.
What could have been done to avoid watching stocks which could turn a billionare into a millionare? Well, avoiding stocks one does not understand would be pretty obvious.  For me it would mean eliminating 99,99% of all available public companies. Who has the time to read annual reports 10 years back in time and cross check the information with other sources, comparing stocks within and between industries, countries, different times etc.? Do professional investors always do it? Their own analysis? The work involved is so huge, it must be a full time job of a big team dedicated to eliminating bad investments. This is not a kind of information available on the net for free or for small subscription fee. Below are my fleeting personal impressions while searching the net for investing ideas, do not take anything on blind faith. Reading Morningstar.com have been a huge disappointment until now, this is not a kind of thorough  analysis one would use to take serious decisions. I can only think of one stock recommendation  out of quite a few I have read about and followed that played out the way Morningstar's analysis predicted: Discovery Financial services. The star system is more misleading than useful, a big number of five star stocks turned out to be value traps, a lot of hype growth stocks with one star made a lot of money to their investors. I think stock analysis is just a little sidekick for Morningstar which makes most of the money selling mutual fund information to investors. Motley Fool is another self serving site with a prodigeous marketing machine, producing conveyer belt articles with minimal research or thought behind it. For a few informative peaces of information one has to waste a lot of time reading all the hidden marketing with attractive headlines written for the sake of selling a subscription or a new "immensely profitable service" to people searching information about companies. Google Apple and you get Motley Fool selling you Motley Fool. Google Google and you get Motley Fool selling their research or whatever. I can not believe a mass product could be a profitable idea. Huge numbers of Fool.com readers not influencing the price of the companies they are recommending. Their handling of Netflix story has been definitely a point where I started being very sceptical about their ideas. Netflix has been a core recommendation for quite a while, with screaming buys at prices which sound ridiculous today. Well being flexible and looking for new profitable ideas might be a reasonable method. But I feel like there is too much of braining wash selling superinvestors without failure, too little analysis of mistakes. Now it is Apple which is the main darling of Motley Fool. This is a company which is supposed to grow forever, the most innovative, wide moat bla-bla, which is going to be valued at several trillions  and collect all the money from all the fans all over the world. It will last a long time before another company produces a product (or iOS) equalling that of Apple. For me this is not a question of whether it will happen, but how soon. Eventually after some investors take big losses, the recommendation will disappear just like Netflix and new darling be presented to the community of forgetful subscribers. May be buying the whole portfolio of their stocks really beats the market, excuse me I just do my own research or do my own mistakes with no one to blame but myself. Still there are some extremely clever investors playing at the CAPS, I think this is the most valuable part of Fool.com at the moment, since their portfolios are freely available to scrutiny in contrast to those of the players of Marketocracy.com