The Iomega folder gets gets curiouser and curiouser. The promise of fame from this week's Fortune Magazine cover story proved to be stronger for QW001 than his desire to be anonymous. Diomega, on the other hand, appears to be suffering from his fame. It's all about money and liability these days in our beloved America. Or is it?
We on this particular board have personified the Motley Fool. In the beginning we were cogent and up to date, industrious and generous, happy in our iconoclastic trade. Then came the attention of the sophisticated manipulators preying on the weak; along came the low-lifes shouting out their sleazy posts, and even came the fund managers asserting their superiority. We Fools endured. We were not at our best through much of this, and at times crude and thoughtless posts showed up on our board which have been held up as examples of Fooldom.
The press isn't so interested in the purely good things that happen in the world, but in the things that excite its readers whether these be sentimental or controversial. The Gardners can be made out to be Horatio Algers, the sentimental side of things, and they can also be made out to be controversial. Perfect. Then the press has all of us, as well. Irresistible for creating drama, and ultimately the source of material for discrediting the anti-establishment, threatening ideas of our boys in foolscaps.
Fortune Magazine cannot afford to ridicule us just yet. Skepticism is the setup. Those guys aren't so dumb as the chihuahua on CNBC. They can see that the Gardners have gotten results better than the street for the past 15 months. Ignore that at your peril. Yet we can be sure that a stumble in the market, a momentary failure in the Fool Portfolio, will bring a rain of criticism from within and without.
I ask you, where is Fooldom most vulnerable right now? Twenty million shorted shares say we are wrong about Iomega, a stock which is a flag over Fool HQ. I have to think that the street is invested in creating havoc hereabouts. I can't stand Oliver Stone's movies, but this here is about turf. Kids in gangs kill one another for the rights to sell drugs on street corners, so there is nothing outlandish in thinking that Wall Street will not just kick back and watch while The Fools educate its buyers.
We are having a hard time figuring out these shorts. As someone eloquently said, "Who are those guys?" Someone else said this short money was "smart money." If that is so why is this smart money hanging in there when Iomega is sailing along, just sailing along? The company eats bad news for breakfast. It calls the bluff of a major money house as it calls off a secondary and goes for the capital market instead. Brains and guts and a revolutionary product are hard to discredit. Why so many shorts?
The answer occurred to me when I was reading what Q was doing and saying. Such arrogance, such contempt for us here on these boards. You see? The smart money has underestimated us. Their view of the world is that they alone are the smart money. For many years the little investor got screwed and the smart money is accustomed to having its way with us. Can we expect any respect from it after so long a time in compliance to its wishes?
Spartacus rose up against the Roman legions and lost, but Rome's arrogance and contempt was in the end its undoing. Human nature hasn't changed in all the millennia of our existence and I don't think the Street is willingly going to give up its kingdom, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of its ultimate demise. We Fools can be grateful we are in this case babes at the breast, suckling in blissful ignorance of the mayhem we are creating in the lives of all those protecting their turf. We are almost oblivious to all that. Intelligence does not belong to anyone. It operates through us as we are willing to see what is, and when we see what is, change occurs. That is the flow of life and there is nothing that can stop it, not even the smart money.
May we always be humble in the presence of Foolishness.