I think you have frustrations with people other than me. I manage my own money, and clearly stated that I think it's fantastic that the original poster is managing his own. More people should do it.
I warned against giving financial advice because I had a bad experience doing it. I fail to see how that's disingenuous, consider it trying to help someone else learn from my mistakes. Making mistakes with your own money is fine, making mistakes with someone elses' is an awful feeling that I would just as soon help others avoid. The thing about investing success is that it makes a person cocky and more prone to offer advice at the the worst possible time, when their performance is most likely to regress to the mean.
You are ignoring an important point of mine - that the advice being offered here is terrible. He thought he was going to buy a leveraged oil fund and get double beta, when he was actually buying a day trading tool that tries to offer double beta on a daily basis. It's not the same as buying USO on margin. Anyone that holds UCO over the long term is almost assured of underperformance. That is a fundamental mistake, not nitpicking. And 5% is a larg-ish position in a concentrated porfolio, this was a 15% weighting. Don't get me started on the ARMH selection (well criticized elsewhere) and the age inappropriate / poorly timed 55% bond position.
Finally, it's not like I cherrypicked a random blog to criticize - this person wrote about it and submitted it to HN. I don't have time to police the internet, but this was inviting feedback, and mine is critical.
But that's my point. It wasn't that his advice wasn't wrongheaded or flat ignorant, it was your reaction.
"Oh, No! You have no _right_ to change your mind!" It's a blog post. It has as much legitimacy and authority over marketplaces as the entire CNBC network, i.e. none at all. Time and again, we see people on these so-called business networks doling out terribly wrong advice that, if followed, would cost you dearly, even in the short term (e.g., Jim Cramer's infamous "long on Bear Stearns" rant only a week before it went out of business). Cramer is a guy that's been a hedge fund manager and stock prognosticator for as long as some of us on HN (not me, mind you) have been alive and for some reason is just as stunningly ignorant of future events in the market as a market newbie.
This is the world that we live in now. We'll all just have to accept the fact that there are people who document everything that is going on in their minds, whether it's what they ate for lunch to their forex trading strategy to their insistence on voting for only old white Protestant men. Nothing OP did was immoral or illegal. It was content. Information, no matter how right or wrong, wants to be free. And, you're free to opine on it, and I on yours.
Of course the poster has a right to change his mind. I said I wasn't letting him off the hook so easily. Totally different things, and I agree with you completely on your point while standing by my original one.
I warned against giving financial advice because I had a bad experience doing it. I fail to see how that's disingenuous, consider it trying to help someone else learn from my mistakes. Making mistakes with your own money is fine, making mistakes with someone elses' is an awful feeling that I would just as soon help others avoid. The thing about investing success is that it makes a person cocky and more prone to offer advice at the the worst possible time, when their performance is most likely to regress to the mean.
You are ignoring an important point of mine - that the advice being offered here is terrible. He thought he was going to buy a leveraged oil fund and get double beta, when he was actually buying a day trading tool that tries to offer double beta on a daily basis. It's not the same as buying USO on margin. Anyone that holds UCO over the long term is almost assured of underperformance. That is a fundamental mistake, not nitpicking. And 5% is a larg-ish position in a concentrated porfolio, this was a 15% weighting. Don't get me started on the ARMH selection (well criticized elsewhere) and the age inappropriate / poorly timed 55% bond position.
Finally, it's not like I cherrypicked a random blog to criticize - this person wrote about it and submitted it to HN. I don't have time to police the internet, but this was inviting feedback, and mine is critical.