This site will never recommend specific investments or investment managers. There are a few reasons for this:
I Don’t Know You
I don’t know you. I don’t know what your ability or willingness to take risk is. I don’t know your liquidity needs or investment time horizon. Unless I know you and understand your situation well, it’s impossible to make a recommendation.
To illustrate the above, consider that I will often make different recommendations to the exact same client! Suppose a client has four accounts, but wants to invest all of them identically. I may recommend a specific index fund for one account, a different share class of the same fund for the second account, a different fund targeting the same index for a third account because it is taxed differently than the first two, and a separately managed account targeting the same index for the fourth account due to tax considerations. The client may be purchasing the same underlying holdings in all four accounts, but there are four different recommendations.
Things Change
Things change. An investment may look attractive in one environment, but not in another. A manager’s strategy may “drift” over time, turning a low-risk portfolio into a high-risk one. Time stamping recommendations could help, but not to the level that I’d be comfortable with.
Clients Come First
Sourcing and conducting due diligence on investment opportunities is what I do in my day job for clients and many of the funds that we invest in have capacity constraints. My goal is to help the investor community as much as possible, but not at the expense of my clients.
The Bottom Line
Investment advice is personal and recommendations should be made within the context of an investor’s situation. To make a good recommendation, I’d need to know someone’s ability to take risk, willingness to take risk, time horizon, liquidity needs, tax situation, net worth, account details, and a lot more. If I were to make a recommendation on this blog, I’d have to list out all of the nuances, caveats, exceptions, and so on, which I do not believe is feasible.
Its not clear to me how anyone can make a recommendation to strangers, so I will leave the specific recommendations to the talking heads on CNBC and the writers who contribute to Seeking Alpha. Publishing specific recommendations for the general public is not something I want to do, nor do I believe it is especially helpful to individual investors. My goal is to be helpful to investors.
