Ralph
The Great Connector Mystery
It started out with a great deal of ambition and promise as Jae Jun brought OSV to market. For quick fundamental information on the value of a company as an investment, he built a pretty solid system for rating investment in a company. All of this groundwork over time implied that coloring within the lines of O$V would lead to a pretty picture of money made. But through life changes, the implied promise was passed to Mike to somehow fulfill. I think that manifested itself into one recommendation of a stock, REI, along with recommendations of reams of prospective reading material. While that reading material may hold great nuggets of investment advice, it runs counter to what I understood to be one of the original OSV concepts of a quick and easy method to value stocks. For the implied promise of making money to be hidden inside the voluminous reading of successful published stock market investors is kind of the equivalent of saying to the proverbial prospector, "There's your mountain, go find your gold." It's built on the truth there is gold in the mountains, but you vs. the mountain is hardly an easy or quick proposition to finding gold even if it came with a secret map. ;-) Another way to state my point of view is, if OSV was built on the premise of being able to reliably and quickly give you basic value investment-worthy information, it seems counter-productive to say, "here's some valuable reading that may help you better use the OSV information." I know there is value in those links, but I hope you can see that it as at least presumptive to think some, most, or all of your members have the bandwidth to wade through it and find nuggets that may enhance your use of OSV. I for one, though retired, would never find the time to read all the material sent my way. My investment portfolio is important, but so are many others things in my life. I was attracted to OSV by its promise of clear and quick investment info and the hope that as a value investor, it would help point me towards investments with good returns. I think statistically it's proven that while OSV info renders solid value investing information, but it is not a shortcut to great investment returns. Bottom line, OSV has a beautiful platform to quickly show the value of prospective investments. That is its' core. But all along it seemed to imply, 'and with it you can . . .' and whatever that "can" is appears to be a struggle for both OSV and its customers. For me, to continue to renew my membership, either you have to sell it for what it does best, which is to quantify the value of an investment and leave it at that, or finally figure out what the connector is to that process that gives it added value.
Response from Old School ValueOct 15, 2019
Hi Ralph, Thanks for your thoughtful comments. It seems like most of your review is about our free weekly email newsletter, which curates what we think are the week's best investment reads and puts them in a list with a short description. It makes a lot of sense that reading and interpreting everything each week would be pretty time-consuming. However, the recommendation of investors we admire is to read widely, so our aim is to help with that, by significantly narrowing down your weekly options to articles where you won't go wrong. That said, it really is just a "best links of the week" kind of a newsletter, and if it's too much noise, you should definitely unsubscribe! You make a good overall point about the direction of our content, though: we should align our content with what our app does best -- helping to understand the fundamentals of a stock, and in particular, its valuation. Maybe a weekly reading links newsletter isn't quite right for us. This is definitely something we'll think about. Best, Mike