In 2008 I was hooked on the blog/website whatever you call it, and read it religiously… That was 5 years ago.
Although I agree that they may still have some good investigative stuff, linking to some important issues… I became really turned off by the constant cynicism and conspiratorial messages including the overall tone. i guess it took me a while to mature and grow out of it. Since 2010 they have been tracking the weekly movement of aircraft carriers in the gulf predicting an imminent attack on Iran, and bread lines from the next great depression -ok. From what I understant, there is more than one writer that uses the alias “Tyler Durden” and the founder is alleged to be a "disgraced Wall St. trader- " whatever, but they write with uniform voice.
The website is not meant to offer investment advice but it is obvious that they have a “downside bias” and have been calling for doom and gloom, essentially an economic catastrophe with the dollar plunging to levels nothing short of images like the Weimar Republic marks. “Any day now Silver will hit $100, i’m telling yah”.
The point I realized is that as an analyst/ money manager, reading consistently biased commentary is not intrusive to making sound trading and investment decisions. Maybe I am more sucseptable than others, but I prefer to read non narrative news articles, interpret raw data, and analyze real financial analysis to make my own decisions. I consider zero hedge to be a financial news tabloid with outrageous headlines and mundane inside jokes. Give me a 10k, spreadsheet, yield curve, bar chart and I can reach my own conclusions. The website is targeted for the amatuer yahoo message board crowd and not appropriate for serious professionals.
Yep, SA has some really good independent contributers that occasionaly drop a nugget of gold. Some famous money managers/ CEOs also post there. Reed Hastings of Netflix an example.
seriously, there is so much better stuff to read (SA, WSJ, Bloomberg, Barrons, IBD, professional research reports)… i dont need the TMZ of financial news selling t-shirts for $19.95 telling me how the market top is in!, 365 days a year.
i think the appeal is that many people read the headlines and articles and think they getting the “sinister dark real inside story, while all the fat cats on Wall St. are sipping on a latte”. the site has a superiority complex that connects with college students need to be different, like a hipster thing. Reading the articles, I can almost picture Ben Bernanke presiding over a smokey and hooded ceremony at Jackson Hole masterminding with the Council on Foreign Relations on how to enslave the human race…
Poor, poor Stolper went 0/12 last year on his currency calls. But, every month people can’t wait to hear what he’s going to do next because he works at GS. ZH is the only place that reminds us that this guy isn’t good at his job. It’s not like ZH can manipulate the numbers. Either the call is right or it isn’t. They just pass along the info.
^^ i’ll admit that I do wast time on the internet, and these reoccuring themes on ZH play out like an entertaining soap opera. but so what… are you going to fade the trade?
The imprication with GS is almost some type of envious resentment. like “these guys make a shit load of money but they are actually idiots and i’m better, nah nah nah boo boo”. the story line is always the same… the SEC is a bunch of mastrabating morons, the ratings agency are worthless, Corzine deserves jail, HFT is rigged, Silver will go to 200, the BSL figures are fugged, the MSM commentary is sugar coated… yawn
it got old for me. this thread is just my opinion and i think more people will agree with me as time goes by… i have the website open right now and im not against looking at it… just trying to point out some things. my brother who is a college dropout and collects Silver Eagles thinks he is “Aswad Damodoran” because he reads the site and has 100 oz of silver.