Bad Investing Linkbait

The Bad

I think Mr. Freedland has had enough things said about him here and here over the past week. You see comments like

Wow, the writer suffered an 8% short term loss and panicked ..What courage, what conviction,This guy actually has readers and listeners ?
They must be deaf and dumb mutes..

and

Robert, I know where you’re coming from with the 8% and out. That rule, which is your rule for yourself only, should have exceptions like everything else.

to some unknown bashing like

Your 8% loss on 70 total shares of Visa with a value around $5600……….hmmmmm okkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
@#%^%&**()&^^&…

The Good

There are also some very supportive comments about Mr. Freedland’s investing appraoach like:

Why the personal castigation and name calling for Mr Freedland’s investment decision? Its his money and time. Perhaps. instead of calling him names, you wrote a short paper on your “investment rules” along with breakout of your successes and failures so we could judge you?

and

Who cares about the name calling posts…just skip those and move on to the more serious ones…

So, not all are bad.

The SEO in me

I can’t help but wonder, while the investing advice could be horrible, the SEO benefits for SeekingAlpha could be huge from articles like these. It caught my attention, enough that I actually subscribed to SeekingAlpha.com as a member so I could make my posts.

Talks about the concept of creating a compelling article as “bait” is probably overdone, but once in a while, unintentional authors create more buzz than they realize. How many readers on investing hate bad advice from reputable websites? I know I do - even though my experience in the stock market is limited. It even sends chill down spines of the more seasoned investors to hear things like “selling visa on 8% decrease.” - correct me if I’m wrong.

So with such articles floating around, it pushes the buttons of many investors, beginners to experienced. It gets people talking about it - I’d be damn - I’m writing an entire post on it. I even linked to it without a “nofollow” tag!

p/s: To Robert Freedland, I admire you on your principles and sticking in your kitchen But I do hope you have at least 100 shares of Visa in your portfolio somewhere that you’re not telling us about…