TRUST
How can we trust you when you get paid to write about companies?
You shouldn’t trust anyone. No newsletter writer, no stock tout website, no Twitter pundit. The phrase ‘do your own due diligence’ is said often as a defense by people who are telling you to buy or sell stocks because they don’t want you to sue them when you lose money taking their advice having not read the fine print disclosure that reveals how much they were paid and how conflicted they are.
Our disclosures are simple: We own the stock or we don’t, the company we’re talking about is client or it isn’t. We don’t tell you to buy. We don’t tell you to sell. We are a part of your due diligence.
Companies pay us to keep them in our attention span, because not doing so means being out of the conversation, and that leaves a company as just another ticker on the outside looking in.
But when those companies pay us to discuss them, they don’t receive any automatic pass. We’re clear with them about this: they have to hit the milestones they’ve laid out, they have to run their company as a business and not a promotion, they have to do what they said they would do when they invited you to be a part owner.
If they don’t, we’ll be the ones hitting first and hardest. That’s important to us – and to the companies involved – because only then will you believe us when we say nice things about those companies.
That’s what’s made us so successful. We’re not promoters. We’re the ones who keep the promoters honest.