MarketVVizard's Market Thoughts

» MarketVVizard - Intel comments on jobs

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - News), the biggest success story to emerge out of California's Silicon Valley, has ruled out any plans to expand in its home state, its chief executive said on Tuesday. Speaking before technology managers at the annual Gartner Symposium ITXpo conference here, Intel CEO Craig Barrett blamed what he called 20 years of political mismanagement of the California economy for driving Intel and other businesses out.

"California has to treat business as something it has to attract and nurture," the Intel executive and foe of excessive government regulation said.

Barrett, who now lives in nearby Arizona, has joined a chorus of executives who criticize California policies on workers' compensation insurance, investments tax credits and generous spending on social programs as "anti-business."

In responding to the mounting political controversy over the transfer of jobs to lower-cost states as well as overseas, Barrett discounted plans by Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger to reverse California's job exodus.

"All this talk of offshoring (moving high-tech jobs to low-cost countries) is interesting, but it's a microcosm of the larger issue of how the U.S. will compete" in a global economy, Barrett told an audience of 6,000 corporate technology buyers.

Intel, the world's largest chip manufacturer, operates plants that stretch from Sacramento, California to Arizona to Israel and China.

Over the past decade, Oregon, on the northern border of California, has displaced California as the state with the largest number of Intel employees.

Arizona now has more Intel employees than Silicon Valley, where the company's headquarters remain, although California is still ahead in overall employees when including its Sacramento plant. Intel employed about 78,700 people worldwide last year.

The Intel executive complained that, while much of the world seeks to lure high-tech businesses, California provides support to agriculture, steel, shrimp farming and other sectors he described as "19th century" industries.

GLOBAL ECONOMY MOVES ON

He offered little if any hope of reversing course and expanding again within California, where Intel was founded in 1969.

"It's quite simple," Barrett said when asked by Gartner analysts whether Intel would be hiring or expanding plant capacity in California in the future. Barrett fell silent and nodded his head decisively left and right, a wordless signal that his answer was a firm "No."

Later, Barrett partly qualified himself, saying that Intel would not slow the long drift of jobs and investments overseas "unless there was some dramatic change" in which Schwarzenegger succeeded in "rolling back" existing laws.

The actor-turned politician had made attracting businesses back to the state a central plank in his recent campaign for state governor in which he won in a landslide.

India, China and Russia alone now have somewhere between 250 million and 500 million highly educated knowledge workers between them, Barrett estimated, surpassing not just the population of California, but that of the entire United States.

Global competition and the maturing U.S. electronics market now means that 70 percent of Intel's markets lie outside the United States and its investments reflect that, Barrett said.

"Our investments are really following our customers," Barrett said.

-- posted by MarketVVizard

» MarketVVizard - ULTIMATE PPET

Learnings from Gilder. Note how he STILL doesn't get it. He is and always will be one of the biggest PPETS of our time. He is still blaming outside factors (the govenment / regulation / taxes / blah blah blah) for his failures. But what should concern us the most is the following snippet:

Today, as the telecom sectors rebounds, Mr. Gilder appears to be re-emerging as an influential thinker who can once again move markets. Over the last 52 weeks, the Gilder Technology Index has risen 221 percent, while the Nasdaq was up 71 percent and the S&P was up 29 percent. A little bit of excitement is beginning to creep back into the Telecosm Lounge.

INDEED, one day this month, after Mr. Gilder mentioned the Avistar Communications Corporation, a small company that sells videoconferencing systems, in the Telecosm Lounge, the stock price doubled over the next two days.

This turn of events, Mr. Gilder confesses, is making him just a tad nervous - but not enough to shake his sunny outlook for the U.S. economy in general and technology in particular. Employment, he says, is on the upswing. Not only will the economy come back, but it will come back "very vigorously." And a budget deficit? Nonsense! "All those numbers are just goofy," he said. "The whole thing is one-eyed economists who can see liabilities but not assets."

FULL ARTICLE:
October 19, 2003 The Revolution Is Coming, Eventually By KATIE HAFNER

SHORTLY before noon on a drizzly day in late August, George Gilder had a housekeeping announcement to make during his annual technology conference at the Squaw Creek resort in Lake Tahoe. The weather forecasters had been dead wrong, he said, taking some obvious delight in this pronouncement. Lunch would be served indoors.

Mr. Gilder's swipe at the meteorologists wasn't just an opportunity to elicit a few chuckles from the audience. It was also a subtle reminder to the 350 or so faithful in attendance that he is not the only one who can botch a prediction.

Then again, few people have ever lost their shirts betting on the weather. Investors who believed in Mr. Gilder's wildly optimistic predictions about the telecommunications revolution, on the other hand, spent the last few years watching their portfolios unravel.

Now, slowly but surely, portions of the telecom industry are recovering. Shares of the companies Mr. Gilder recommends in The Gilder Technology Report - a more diverse mix than it used to be - have outperformed the Nasdaq by a healthy margin for the past year, and his adherents are cheering up. And Mr. Gilder is gradually regaining the credibility that nearly vaporized before his eyes three years ago.

Still, a sense of wariness and an air of enthusiasm held in check hovered over this year's Tahoe conference. And if any group has reason to be wary, it is this one.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Mr. Gilder, 63, is - to use one of his favorite words - the reification of all that went right, and then calamitously wrong, in the new economy.

In early 2000, Mr. Gilder presided over a small but lucrative empire that consisted of his newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report, and its various spinoffs - with names like Digital Power Reporter, Dynamic Silicon and the Supply Side Investor - half a dozen annual conferences and a staff of 55.

At the time, Mr. Gilder's net worth, around $7 million, was modest by dot-com standards, but Merrill Lynch and Hambrecht & Co. were vying to take his company, Gilder Publishing, public, valuing it at $150 million to $200 million. His newsletters had 110,000 subscribers.

Then, as quickly as the riches and the promise of more riches came, they vanished. People canceled their subscriptions by the tens of thousands; only the original newsletter survives today, with just 8,500 subscribers. Since the tech bubble burst, all but five staff members have been laid off. A former business partner holds a lien on Mr. Gilder's house. And in a cruel twist of fate, Mr. Gilder, an outspoken critic of the nation's tax structure, finds himself at the mercy of the Internal Revenue Service, as he awaits the agency's final decision on the terms of his tax bill.

Last month, just home from a trip to Shanghai, Mr. Gilder sat in the spare yet elegantly appointed guest cottage next door to his house in rural Tyringham, Mass., and reflected on how he happened to come within an eyelash of losing everything.

George Gilder is a slight, gentle, unprepossessing man. He holds himself with some delicacy, and although he is physically fit (he runs six miles a day), it seems as if a gust of wind could knock him off his feet.

Yet when he opens his mouth to rail against "idiot" American economists, corporate lobbyists and the perniciousness of taxes ("the power to tax is the power to destroy") and government regulation, the mild manner evaporates and Mr. Gilder might be mistaken for a glassy-eyed nut case on the University of California at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza shouting random invectives at passers-by.

Mr. Gilder, however, is no wacko, and his invectives are anything but random. Through the years, he has been building his own version of a socioeconomic unified field theory, integrating politics, sex, economics and technology, with a dose of religion thrown in.

MR. Gilder hails from solid New England stock, if tinged with a "Buddenbrooks"-like air of decay. His family settled in Tyringham in the early 1900's. His great-grandfather was Louis Comfort Tiffany, the glassmaker; a great-aunt, Mary O'Hara, wrote "My Friend Flicka."

When George was 3, his father, Richard, a pilot, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean during World War II. David Rockefeller, Richard's roommate at Harvard, saw to it that George, who he considered to be like his surrogate son, received a Harvard education as well.

In the 60's and 70's, while a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon, Nelson A. Rockefeller and George W. Romney, Mr. Gilder branched out briefly into attacking feminism by writing magazine articles and books opposing day care and celebrating a woman's place in the home. In the early 1970's, Time magazine and the National Organization for Women named him Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year. Shortly thereafter, having decided that this was "a triumph I could not exceed," Mr. Gilder migrated to supply-side economics.

He hit his stride with the best-selling book, "Wealth and Poverty," in 1981, in which he argued that capitalism and entrepreneurialism are intrinsically altruistic, oriented toward the needs of other people. Selfishness and greed, on the other hand, pave the way to socialism, as avaricious people petition the state for benefits they haven't earned.

Although the book made Mr. Gilder wealthy, he started looking for a new focus. He hit on computer chips, which he decided were fast becoming the most important development in the world economy. He took some time off to learn solid-state physics, and soon became one of the semiconductor industry's leading pundits.

Next came his infatuation with the "telecosm," a word Mr. Gilder coined to describe the convergence of computers and communications. In the mid-1990's, he argued that the expansion of the Internet was giving rise to demand so great that the so-called big pipes carrying information would need huge capacity to accommodate all the data, voice and video they would be transporting.

In 1996, Mr. Gilder predicted, famously and, as it turned out, erroneously, that by the turn of the century, broadband connections to the home would be ubiquitous. He described a telecosm of fiber-optic and wireless networks girding the globe. Companies like Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications Inc., and Global Star Software sprang up to help meet the expected demand for bandwidth.

The first Gilder Technology Report was published in 1996. Before long, his influence on the stock price of the companies he favored - many of them obscure start-ups - came to be known as the "Gilder effect." Within minutes of a company making a debut on Mr. Gilder's list of darlings, the stock price soared, some by as much as 80 percent.

His insights were at such a premium, he says, that he was paid as much as $100,000 for a public speech.

Subscribers to his newsletter, in the meantime, were delirious with joy as they watched the value of their holdings rise. "It was like finding the fountain of youth or a money tree or something," said Dick Sears, a retired actuary in Palisades, N.Y. Mr. Sears is a subscriber who independently produces the daily Gilder Technology Index, which charts the performance of the stocks on Mr. Gilder's list against the Nasdaq and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

Then reality intervened.

Demand for bandwidth, it turned out, was not what everyone had thought it would be. The networks weren't filling up with customers at anywhere near the rate that the new-economy faithful had expected. The market had a huge glut of capacity, and many of the fiber-optic networks were left sitting idle.

Within a few months of the March 2000 plunge in the stock market, many of Mr. Gilder's prime picks nose-dived. "My whole optical paradigm crashed, and it crashed on my head," Mr. Gilder said.

When things fell apart, newsletter subscribers were irate. "They were mad and hurt and aggrieved and pained and broke," Mr. Gilder said. "And, they had a real grievance. These people didn't lose 50 percent or 80 percent of their money. They lost 98 percent of their money."

As fate would have it, says Mr. Gilder, 90 percent of subscribers had bought their stocks during the peak months of 1999 and 2000. Some of them blamed Mr. Gilder personally for their losses. One group of subscribers started a class-action lawsuit against him, but the suit never got off the ground. He was also sued by his chief financial officer for severance pay, and settled for $7,000.

Marc Denny, a longtime subscriber in Los Angeles, said of Mr. Gilder: "Because of his eloquence and unique insights, a lot of people put a lot of trust in him." Mr. Gilder was and still is a regular presence in the Telecosm Lounge, the electronic bulletin board for his newsletter subscribers. He told people on the board many things as the stocks went up, and then as stocks fell. But the one thing he never told them was to sell.

"I was in this really ridiculous position," he said, "because I explicitly didn't do timing." On the other hand, Mr. Gilder said, it was "obvious to anyone with eyes to see" that the stocks would undergo a massive correction. "I never said it," he said. "I'd hint at it on the board, but I never said it."

Many of the companies - including Global Crossing, Global Star, Metromedia Fiber, WorldCom (which now is known as MCI) and Corning - are now either reduced to wisps of their former selves or gone entirely.

Mr. Gilder was hardly insulated from the fallout. Not only did he lose hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Global Crossing investment alone, but other stocks in which he had large holdings plunged. His church, the Christian evangelical congregation he has belonged to since his childhood and to which he had donated a generous amount of Global Crossing and Avanex stock, took a big hit.

When his subscribers fled so suddenly, Mr. Gilder's tax bill skyrocketed. As long as the number of subscriptions is rising, taxable income is nullified by new subscriptions. But when subscribers are lost, each expired subscription means the income has been earned and taxes must be paid.

Forbes, which owns half the Gilder Technology Report and thereby half its liability, is helping to "mollify the tax ogre," as Mr. Gilder puts it.

ANOTHER blow came as a result of his own shortsightedness. When Mr. Gilder formed his company, he did something that turned out to be unwise. Rather than set up a limited liability corporation, he incorporated Gilder Publishing in a way that eventually made him personally liable for every penny of the debt and taxes that he incurred. Even Ritz-Carlton came after him for an unpaid bill of $100,000 for a conference held at one its hotels in early 2000.

Back in the salad days of early 2000, Mr. Gilder also decided to buy out his two partners for $10 million. Although he managed to pay all but $1 million of that, one of the former partners - Chuck E. Frank, a restaurateur from Los Angeles - now holds a lien not just on Mr. Gilder's house but on the 100 acres it sits on as well.

The lien on his property has been the ultimate insult heaped upon injury for Mr. Gilder, who grew up in the modest yet comfortable house nestled idyllically against the Berkshire hills. It is the farmhouse in which he and his wife, Nini, raised and home-schooled three daughters and a son.

How did Mr. Gilder get it so wrong?

Mr. Gilder's critics say he was too focused on technology at the expense of business realities. Others, farther to the left, question his complete embrace of free markets.

"He doesn't trust the government but he does trust free markets," said Tom Frank, an outspoken Gilder critic who is editor of The Baffler, a journal of cultural criticism. "That's very curious to say in the aftermath of the catastrophe that befell his portfolio."

Mr. Gilder looks out the window and appears to be pondering a cow as it grazes nearby, but is actually deep in thought over this question.

The one thing he did not foresee, he says, was the effect of what he calls "this incredible morass of regulations" affecting the telecommunications industry. "I knew the factors, but I kept believing technology would triumph over them." He said he still believes it will, eventually.

Richard Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes and a longtime colleague of Mr. Gilder's, put it this way: "I don't think anything he's said or written about the trajectory of technology or the underlying economics has been wrong. But George, like all of us, got caught up in the stock market to heights that weren't sustainable."

At the same time, Mr. Karlgaard and others point out what they believe to be a fundamental truth about Mr. Gilder that helps explain his world views, which are, they say, at their core religious.

"George believes that scientists and entrepreneurs are almost doing the religious work of revealing the universe to us," Mr. Karlgaard said. "This whole view of taxation and government policy is, 'What can we do to liberate the technologists?' All of his beliefs spring from that."

Today, as the telecom sectors rebounds, Mr. Gilder appears to be re-emerging as an influential thinker who can once again move markets. Over the last 52 weeks, the Gilder Technology Index has risen 221 percent, while the Nasdaq was up 71 percent and the S&P was up 29 percent. A little bit of excitement is beginning to creep back into the Telecosm Lounge.

INDEED, one day this month, after Mr. Gilder mentioned the Avistar Communications Corporation, a small company that sells videoconferencing systems, in the Telecosm Lounge, the stock price doubled over the next two days.

This turn of events, Mr. Gilder confesses, is making him just a tad nervous - but not enough to shake his sunny outlook for the U.S. economy in general and technology in particular. Employment, he says, is on the upswing. Not only will the economy come back, but it will come back "very vigorously." And a budget deficit? Nonsense! "All those numbers are just goofy," he said. "The whole thing is one-eyed economists who can see liabilities but not assets."

More important, Mr. Gilder feels utterly vindicated on the topic of broadband. He points out that the trajectory that began in the United States but was derailed by regulation is continuing in Asia. In South Korea, for instance, 75 percent of households have a broadband connection.

Mr. Gilder is also optimistic about his personal situation. Most of the stocks he now holds are on the rise. He is still waiting for the I.R.S. to make a final determination on the taxes he owes from the newsletter debacle. But he is hopeful that he will not lose his home, as long as he is able to continue making $10,000 monthly payments to his former partner for the next 17 years.

"It does mean I'm working for the government and my partners for the rest of my life," he said, noting the irony of seeing his wages go to fuel a government with a tax structure and regulatory practices he has spent so many years lambasting.

His speaking engagements have all but dried up. He still travels to Washington occasionally to discuss telecommunications regulation with Bush administraton officials. He does this in his capacity as a senior fellow for the Discovery Institute, a conservative research organization based in Seattle. Still, he says, he prefers to stay home these days and write.

The book closest to completion and scheduled for publication next year is titled "The Cat and the Camera." It is the story of the invention of a radical new camera from a university effort to create a silicon retina. The second, "Crossroads," a collaboration with Bret Swanson, who is executive editor of the Gilder newsletter, is a treatise on the challenge of capitalist China. A third, titled "Analogy," is what Mr. Gilder describes as a defense of the "cumulative authority of science" as told through a relationship between the microelectronics pioneer Carver Mead and the physicist Richard Feynman.

Mr. Gilder discusses all this as the rain falls outside in periodic torrents. He is put in mind of a harrowing incident he feels compelled to recount. If he is aware that the story he is about to tell is an obvious metaphor for the turns his life has taken over the last three years, he does not let on.

One rainy day in 1998, he and his family set out for New Hampshire to see his eldest daughter, Louisa, then a student at Dartmouth, play Desdemona, Othello's wife, who dies at the hand of her jealous husband.

Some 35 miles south of Hanover, his Ford Winstar began to hydroplane. With Mr. Gilder at the wheel, the car flipped over and continued to skid upside down.

When the car finally stopped, it was totaled. But all four passengers were wearing seat belts and, miraculously, they were not hurt. Shaken but undeterred, the Gilders called a taxi to take them the rest of the way. They missed dinner with Louisa but arrived in time for the play.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

-- posted by MarketVVizard

» Kirk - Re: ULTIMATE PPET

Nice article.

FWIW, I warned about Gilder long ago...
http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/i...
I said I tossed his ads in the trash.

-- posted by Kirk

» exproex - Re: ULTIMATE PPET

What does PPET mean?

-- posted by exproex

» MarketVVizard - Re: Re: ULTIMATE PPET

>>"What does PPET mean?"

Wow, I can't believe we actually have someone here who wasn't around from the beginning

The Persuasive Personality Enemy to Speculators [PPETS]

There exist many enemies to the speculator. Once you have overcome the basic enemies: fear, greed, & hope, you must learn to overcome equally dangerous enemies. One of these is the persuasive personality. Many traders do not realize that throughout the history of speculative markets there has always existed an enemy known as "the persuasive personality". You cannot graduate to the higher levels of successful speculation until you can easily identify this enemy.

The following are some of my observations and generalizations concerning PPETS. This is a composite taken from many examples and is not intended to describe anyone in particular.

Common characteristics of PPETS:

1) Is typically male. Specifically, a man with a magnetic personality.

2) He has a history of financial failure. Usually has at least one outright bankruptcy on his record or a total trading capital wipeout. Frequently will have a string of catastrophic failures or near total wipeouts.

3) Could not achieve lasting success as a speculator and possess a strong desire to live though others’ success. This is manifested in offering opinions and commentary to others under the delusion of trying to help or "give back" to the investment community. Often uses the guise of

4) Distorted self image. Delusions of grandeur and irrationally inflated ego (sometimes this comes and goes in spurts). This ego is maintained at all costs, particularly manifesting itself in the burial of past failures and the incessant trumpeting of successes even when trumpeting is not warranted (i.e. success was highly illusory).

5) Failure to admit mistakes or take losses when appropriate. Sometimes revises history (either consciously or unconsciously) to "improve" record of past performance.

6) Failure to correct misjudgments when evidence arises that indicates they were wrong in conclusions reached and touted to others as unquestionable.

7) Inability to grow. Rejects all criticism out of hand. Discards all arguments, no matter how rational or well formed if they disagree with an already stated conclusion. Lacks maturity.

8) Has no objectivity. If the evidence does not agree with preconceived conclusions, the evidence is wrong. There is no room for debate.

9) Is reactive, often jumping on trends just as they have peaked and are ready to change direction. Also known as "piling on". Thinks their odds of impressing other people is increased by jumping on recent trends and boasting about how they have "been right all along". They are rarely early on a new trend because they wait for a trend to be established first before jumping on.

10) Has a background in a trading related industry and enough knowledge and wisdom to offer such that audiences are attracted. This is a key attribute that PPETS need in order to gain the widespread attention they seek. If they do not sound authoritative, convincing, rational, and wise, they will not meet their subconscious desires.

11) Their true character is often revealed when seriously challenged publicly. This can be manifested with anger, spite, or censorship.

12) They get a high from media attention (radio, television, print). Likewise, they get a high from industry attention, and try to surround themselves with industry experts and proven successes.

13) While they often pretend to be emotionally detached, they are often HIGHLY sensitive people that live for positive affirmation which is one reason they get involved in the media.

14) Pattern of personal/relationship failure. Typically has been divorced at least once. Often they have had multiple failed marriages, and several estranged family members. Sometimes the PPET himself has done jail time or has close friends or relatives who have. PPETS often fail to take responsibility for their own role in their volatile relationships. They push people away rather than take time and energy resolving relational issues or putting others first. This leads to bouts of loneliness, which serve to perpetuate the vicious cycle of seeking new followers.

15) They inevitably lead their blind followers to the slaughter. It’s not in any way intentional, just inevitable. While they feel bad about it, they will do everything in their power to hide the facts and often make new attempts to gain trust after such incidents, making every effort to censor critics.

I have found that occasionally PPETS who are bullish will make television appearances. When they are bearish they tend to flourish only in print or on the radio (traditional home for most big-time PPETS). Financial history is littered with PPETS and the carcasses of speculators they have destroyed. This is why I always teach people to develop and nurture their own critical thinking skills. Question everything and everyone. Know your enemies or be destroyed by them.

In closing I’d like to quote from the greatest book on speculation ever written, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre, copyright 1923.

[Select quotes from Chapter 12]
"[The persuasive personality] was a thinker… an unusually well-informed man… He loved to hear and to express ideas and theories and abstractions… he had traded for years and had made and lost vast sums…"

"When I said to you some time ago that a speculator has a host of enemies, many of whom successfully bore from within, I had in mind my many mistakes. I have learned that a man may possess an original mind and a lifelong habit of independent thinking and withal be vulnerable to attacks by a persuasive personality. I am fairly immune from the commoner speculative ailments, such as greed and fear and hope. But being an ordinary man I find I can err with great ease."

"I ought to have been on my guard at this particular time because not long before that I had had an experience that proved how easily a man may be talked into doing something against his judgment and even against his wishes…"

"It was always a pleasure for me to listen to him, he knew so much and he expressed his knowledge so interestingly. I think he is the most magnetic man I ever met."

"We talked of many things, for he is a widely read man with an amazing grasp of many subjects and a remarkable gift for interesting generalization. The wisdom of his speech is impressive; and as for plausibility, he hasn’t an equal. I have heard many people accuse him of many things, including insincerity, but I sometimes wonder if his remarkable plausibility does not come from the fact that he first convinces himself so thoroughly as to acquire thereby a greatly increased power to convince others…"

"He kept at it until I no longer felt sure of my own information… That meant I couldn’t see the market with my own eyes. A man cannot be convinced against his own convictions, but he can be talked into a state of uncertainty and indecision, which is even worse, for that means that he cannot trade with confidence and comfort."

"I cannot say that I got all mixed up, exactly, but I lost my poise; or rather, I ceased to do my own thinking. I cannot give you in detail the various steps by which I reached the state of mind that was to prove so costly to me."

Needless to say, the protagonist (Jesse Livermore) went broke following this persuasive personality and learned his lesson so as not to repeat it. It is my hope that others can learn these lessons WITHOUT going though the pain. I’ll leave you with Jesse’s conclusion:

"To learn that a man can make foolish plays for no reason whatever was a valuable lesson. It cost me millions to learn that another dangerous enemy to a trader is his susceptibility to the urgings of a magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a brilliant mind. It has always seemed to me, however, that I might have learned my lesson quite as well if the cost had been only one million. But Fate does not always let you fix the tuition fee. She delivers the educational wallop and presents her own bill, knowing you have to pay it, no matter what the amount may be. Having learned what folly I was capable of I closed that particular incident. [The PPETS] went out of my life."

If you happen to have PPETS in your financial life, do not attempt to rationalize keeping these influences in your life. PPETS will be correct for a time, but ultimately cloud your judgment and lead you to financial ruin. Be objective and seek input from objective sources. There will always be a host of suckers to satisfy the PPETS, don’t be one of them. If you happen to be a PPET: do not attempt to change your format, just get completely and permanently out of the media altogether. Focus on making an honest living and rebuilding damaged relationships. It may be the hardest thing you have ever done, but it will be well worth it.

-- posted by MarketVVizard

» Kirk - Re: Re: Re: ULTIMATE PPET

One of those that fit many of the PPETS you describe didn't like you very much and he stopped posting here when you challenged him. We won't mention any names... but I have a long memory.

I wonder if he is still on the radio?

-- posted by Kirk

» MarketVVizard - Spending our way to disaster