Lootman wrote:Gengulphus wrote:Lootman wrote:If the argument to have a FA board is that there is already a TA board (and I think that has merit) then there is a corresponding argument to not have a Value board, since there is no TLF Growth investing board, and growth and value are a duopoly in much the same way as FA/TA are.
No, the corresponding argument is to have a Growth board
and a Value board. The argument to have neither a Growth board nor a Value board is an argument in the opposite direction!
More accurately, it is an argument to have either both or neither; not to have one and not the other.
Nonsense - the argument you described in "
If the argument to have a FA board is that there is already a TA board (and I think that has merit)" was an argument to have both boards, so the corresponding argument is to have both boards. Maybe you intended to extend it to an argument for both boards or neither, but if so, that's
your failure to be accurate, not
mine.
And that's all I'm going to say about that particular bit of nonsense - moving on...
Lootman wrote:And given the stated TLF preference for fewer boards, the burden of proof is on those wanting to add two new boards, with all the attendant risk of narrower definitions and more squabbles and moderation workload.
It's utterly and completely clear, if only from the fact that TLF has 69 different visible boards (and at least one invisible one, namely the Moderators board I've seen mentioned a few times) rather than just one, that "fewer boards" is
not TLF's only preference! So any idea that new boards on the basis that that preference should settle the question is an extremely one-dimensional argument.
I'm not entirely certain of what all TLF's other preferences are, but I'm fairly certain they include:
1) To have boards for discussions that a reasonably large number of TLF users want - large enough to keep discussions going. That's one of the big reasons for having the HYP Practical board, for instance - it
does have enough users to keep it going. One can debate why it has so many users, but that won't change the plain fact that it does have them.
2) Not to present people with a board structure that requires them to sift their way through vast numbers of threads they consider uninteresting to find the ones they consider interesting.
Some such sifting will be required, of course - there's no way a board structure can be made ideal for every user. But too much will be a serious deterrent to using the boards - most users will have a point at which the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped so low that they reckon it's a waste of time even looking. For instance, of the subject matter of the five boards in the
Travel Lounge, I only have any real interest in the Cycling board, and even then it's only in actually doing the cycling myself for everyday travel purposes, not in discussing the Tour de France and other cycle races. So the Cycling board is nothing like 100% of interest to me, but there's enough there (when it's actually active!) for me to find it worth my while looking through it. If on the other hand TLF were to stick all five boards together in a Travel Lounge board, there wouldn't be.
3) To discourage argumentative conflicts that have a 'cancerous' tendency to invade and take over other subjects, by saying that they are off-topic on all but some boards. I believe that's why discussions about the merits or otherwise of Brexit will generally get banished to Polite Discussions, for instance, and similarly comments about moderation are required to go to this board or the new Room 101 board, and to-HYP-or-not-to-HYP discussions are required not to go to HYP Practical (and that's the other big reason IMHO why the HYP Practical board exists). Again, one can debate why merits-or-otherwise-of-Brexit discussions, to-HYP-or-not-to-HYP discussions, etc, are so invasive - but the plain fact is that they are.
I'm less certain about one other, but I think it's reasonably consistent with what's been said and done, even though it seems to have been put into practice rather haphazardly:
4) To have a reasonably natural board for just about any investment discussion that has a reasonably defined focus. That condition about having a focus is essential to prevent this preference coming too badly into conflict with the others. For instance, suppose someone wants to discuss Aviva as a company for them to invest in, but wants that discussion to spread out into any and all of:
* any alternative shares or other securities one might invest in instead;
* any method of trying to evaluate companies from their annual reports, investments from how the market is treating them, or other evaluation techniques;
* which types of security (e.g. shares or bonds) to invest in, including stuff about the general nature of the available types;
* investment strategies, including how to choose which strategy to use and for each strategy, how to choose its investments;
* any way of investing in shares (certificates, CREST accounts, nominee accounts, CFDs, spreadbets, etc);
* any method of trying to keep track of important news relating to their investments (and just about all important news relates to investments in some way or other!);
* taxation of their investments (in any country, not just the UK);
* etc, etc, etc.
Basically, the only way to accommodate such a discussion on a single board is to have a single "Investing" board whose subject matter is basically "anything and everything to do with investing" - which does fit in with a "fewer boards" preference, but runs strongly against the other preferences, and I think it's clear from the number of boards that TLF has that that's not the way they've chosen to go!
The way they appear to have gone is basically to say that a thread must have a focus, which matches the board it is on. If its focus clearly doesn't match, it will be moved to somewhere it does; if whether it matches is rather unclear, it will generally be given the benefit of the doubt and left where it is. Users are expected to pay attention to the board that a thread is on and take care not to push the thread away from the focus with their responses; if they feel that they need to respond in such a way, the way they should do so is by posting their response on the appropriate board and putting a crosspost to that in the original thread (yes, that's a bit awkward and a bit more trouble for them - but the price of getting a set of boards that works is some extra awkwardness and work, and nobody should expect to be immune from having some of it land on them).
If the original poster wants to discuss a subject that is too broad to match any board's focus well, they need to start multiple discussions on multiple boards. In the extreme example I've given above, for instance, they would need to start discussions on:
* Share Ideas, to ask for alternative companies they might consider investing in, or for an evaluation of Aviva, in either case without restricting the ideas to particular strategies, etc;
* The FA board being proposed here (if it is created) to ask about techniques for evaluating companies based on their annual reports, etc;
* Technical Analysis to ask about techniques for evaluating investments based on how the market is treating them;
* Investment Strategies to ask about which types of security to invest in and/or the strategies they might use (though a more specific strategies board would be better if it exists and if they know enough about what type of strategy they're interested in);
* Taxes to ask about taxation issues;
* Brokers and Share Dealing to ask about some issues to do with how to hold the investments;
* Various boards in
Sectors & General Shares and
Managing Your Finances for some specific types of investment;
* Other Investing to ask about the things I haven't covered (unless I've missed something else that might be appropriate!).
Though hopefully someone who is that clueless about what they're after will actually go to How Do I Invest and get some help in narrowing down what aspects of the question they first want to discuss...
In practice, none of the boards preclude their subject matter being mentioned and
briefly discussed on others. Nor should they, because it's often relevant (and indeed necessary) for questions that are thoroughly on-topic. So for example, a discussion of Lloyds on Share Ideas that mentions its P/E, P/TBV, gearing, etc, is discussing things that are relevant to Lloyds as a share idea, and it would also be perfectly OK to briefly give their calculation or say that one isn't giving a gearing figure because it's pretty meaningless for banks. None of that will be changed by the creation of a Fundamental Analysis board. And similarly, a post on the Fundamental Analysis board, if it is created, will be perfectly able to mention Lloyds and other companies in examples of how to go about calculating fundamental ratios, decide how significant they are, etc.
Where things go wrong is when the use of off-topic material goes beyond mentions and brief discussions, and deep-dives into more extended discussions that distract from the board's focus. If a discussion of Lloyds as a share idea on Share Ideas gets diverted into an extended "What is P/TBV and what is it good for?" discussion that mentions a lot of other companies as well, or a "What is P/TBV and what is it good for?" discussion on Fundamental Analysis that happens to use Lloyds as an example gets distracted by an "Ah, but you really have to look at all these other aspects of Lloyds as well - its 'culture', how its shares are faring on the market, etc" post into an extended discussion of Lloyds, then in both cases the thread has been 'hijacked' into the other board's territory and things need sorting out, if only because having multiple boards that in practice each cover the entire range of investment discussions without any discernable focus is even worse than having just one "Investing" board.
One other aspect of that is that certain subjects are known 'flashpoints'. For instance, even a brief allusion to what one considers to be the pros and/or cons of Brexit is quite liable to trigger heated reactions from those who take the opposite view, which are likely to trigger equally heated reactions from those who take the same view, etc. Given that sorting such things out becomes more work the more posts there are involved by the time a moderator gets to them, I think stronger countermeasures can be expected to be taken against off-topic material that ventures into such a 'flashpoint' area.
Anyway, how does all of this relate to the proposal to create a fundamental analysis board? Looking at the various preferences I've discussed above:
0) "Fewer boards" argues (somewhat weakly, given the number of boards that exist already) against creating it, or indeed any new board.
1) "To have boards for discussions that a reasonably large number of TLF users want - large enough to keep discussions going". I don't know about this one:
Clariman's poll asked for views on whether the site would benefit from such a board or not, not whether people would actually use it, and it's perfectly possible that some might think that the site would benefit from it but they personally would not use it (for instance because it would give a good home for questions and answers about things they already understand and don't really want to intrude on things they are interested in), or that the site wouldn't benefit but they would use it themselves if it were nevertheless created.
2) "Not to present people with a board structure that requires them to sift their way through vast numbers of threads they consider uninteresting to find the ones they consider interesting." argues weakly in favour of creating it: some will not be interested in its subject matter and will welcome having fewer Share Ideas threads to work through.
3) "To discourage argumentative conflicts that have a 'cancerous' tendency to invade and take over other subjects" doesn't say much either for or against having a board for discussion of fundamental analysis as fat as I can see. But it does argue against the alternative of providing that board by changing Technical Analysis's name and extending its subject to include fundamental analysis. How strongly, I don't know: about 10-20 years ago, I'm certain it would have been a strong argument, and I still see rumblings of TA-vs-FA arguments on this and other websites, but I haven't seen much more than the occasional "tea leaves" comment, etc, for quite a while. So I'm certain that that it would
risk triggering such renewed arguments, but not whether it would actually do so. (Edit: I see after posting that Mel just illustrated my point about such comments while I was previewing and polishing this post!)
4) "To have a reasonably natural board for just about any investment discussion that has a reasonably defined focus." argues in favour of it, as there is no reasonably natural board for discussions whose focus is one or a few similar fundamental ratios, how to determine them, what they are and aren't useful for, etc, at present.
How does this balance out? I'm uncertain, mainly because I don't know the answer about 1) above. I think that needs a poll directed at getting responses about whether and how people would use it, and that poll needs to be about a reasonably specific proposal, ideally board name (fairly succinct), subtitle (for a reminder/explanation of a bit more detail) and guidance (to make it clear what the board is for and just how it affects other boards - hopefully just providing a better home for some poorly-fitting material IMHO).
And even with the results of such a poll, my view about how it all balances out won't ultimately matter - what will resolve the question is how it, together with any other considerations they have, balance out in stooz's and Clariman's minds, not mine.
Gengulphus
