Who I Am and What I Do

In response to one of my daily e-mails, a reader who disagreed with my bearish thesis on a particular stock sent me the following:

Please practice better and more careful reporting. You have an agenda, not that hard to discern, but similar to Fox, it makes all your comments suspect... and there are a number that are useful if they weren't so shrill.

Here was my reply:

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify who I am and what I do.

I am not a journalist, though much of what I do is similar to what any good reporter does: I read a lot, talk to/e-mail with many people, and try to deeply understand complex companies and issues.

But I am, first and foremost, an investor and, secondarily, an investment newsletter publisher.

This means that, unlike a journalist, my goal is, first, to develop a strong opinion about the future of a company or industry – ideally one that is out of consensus, and therefore not reflected in the stock price(s).

Then, I write up my analysis and resulting conclusion (what you pejoratively call "an agenda") and share it with my readers.

I have three objectives: to educate, entertain, and enrich all of my readers.

Every day in these e-mails, I seek to provide solid insights, sound advice, and provocative opinions (if I don't make you laugh out loud and/or spit out your coffee at least once a week, I'm not doing my job!).

In addition, I look, a few times a year, to make a big, bold call. I only do so when I'm extremely confident I'll be proven right. People pay attention because I have a two-decade track record to back me up. Past examples include:

• Recommending Apple (AAPL) when it had a $7.2 billion market cap (vs. $850 billion today) and warning about Cisco (CSCO) when its market cap was $395 billion (vs. $247 billion today), on October 16, 2000 (Cisco, Apple, and Probabilities)

• Pitching Netflix (NFLX) at my conference and on CNBC the day it bottomed at $7.78 on October 1, 2012, when I called it "this decade's Amazon" (you can see my slides here)

• Warning about the Internet, housing, 3D printing, bitcoin, and pot stock bubbles right at their peaks (in the case of the latter two, to the very hour!)