After yesterday’s post outlining Louis James‘ stellar performance in junior mining stocks during 2011, your author receives the following mail from reader ‘G’ concerning the Casey Research energy letter service run by Casey’s liar-in-chief, Marin Katusa (which is fortunately outside normal interests round here, so no need to read it):
Maybe you can get your head wrapped around this, but it makes my head hurt!
Casey’s Energy letter had an end of year wrap-up, and some of the percentage losses seemed a bit suspect. Let’s pick an easy target out of the many losers: RPG.
Recommended a couple years ago at 3.00, so, of course, it’s about a 90% loss. But wait! A few months ago they re-recommend it at 0.55. So anybody who bought that second tranche lost about 50% of that investment as well. But for Casey, there’s a silver lining – by combining those two losses, they get to report a 64% loss on the total position.
I can just imagine Casey subscribers thinking, “Boy, it’s a good thing I averaged down on RPG – I only lost 64% of my money instead of 93%!”
Maybe that’s a legitimate way to report the outcome of a couple trades, but it sure doesn’t seem to accurately reflect the consequences of the RPG recommendations. What do you think – shady reporting or just one of the ways math can be counter-intuitive?
IKN back. What do I think? I think when it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and has a track record of sophistry, obfuscation and outright bullshit lies,…it’s a duck. Keep waddling, Marin.