24. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.

Great chart on investor sentiment here. Classic!

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24. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.

Brian Acker is a well known Canadian money manager who is frequently featured on Canada’s business news channel BNN. He is very polished and spins a good story. Too bad he does not have the performance to back it  up. Be very careful on basing investment decisons on talking heads. Here is what Technical Analyst, Bill Carrigan has to say about Acker.

” I am sure followers of this blog also follow Don Vialoux’s daily TechTalk which is a brisk and refreshing daily commentary on the capital markets.

In his Wednesday morning publication Don quoted a recent study by Standard & Poor’s entitled “Indices beat most managers.” Apparently over the last five years 70% of U.S. large-cap fund managers who use the S&P 500 as a benchmark for comparison have failed to match the performance of the index over that time.

Don’s observation comes a day after BNN regular “black box” analyst Brian Acker glossed over the negative 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5-year returns of the Finley Select US Value 50 fund by insulting his TV audience on live television. The big irritant for Acker was a caller who pointed out the terrible 1-year return (at March 31, 2009) of a negative 53.88%, double the loss of the S&P500 benchmark or peer at a negative 24.10%.

When under pressure from BNN’s Michael Hainsworth to explain the severe underperform and the negative losses from inception Acker effectively blew up in front of a live television audience stating technical analysis to be “useless” and then describing the traders “out there in TV land” to be “hamsters.” Another caller was ridiculed for suggesting a selling strategy.

Wow, I and others just got called “useless rodents” on national television!

I forgive Acker because he was afflicted by a street term known as “Ackers Folly.”

Acker’s folly is the tendency of investors to sell winners quickly (because they are expensive) and to hold losers (because they are cheap).

This affliction can be cleared up with a few visits with a qualified technical analyst.

If Acker had used even the simplest stop loss strategy he could have saved his enterprise from this disaster

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24. April 2009 by Dan Walkow, CFA, CMT.

“With remarkable frankness, Mr. Carney singled out the U.S. government for criticism in his quarterly economic report Thursday, placing much of the blame for Canada’s economic woes on U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s abortive attempts to cleanse financial institutions of their toxic assets.”

Carney is not pulling any punches in his commemts read them here.

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