Alaric wrote:Its adherents fail to consider the risks and vociferously attack anyone pointing them out.
And opponents of HYP strategies often vociferously attack HYP strategies on HYP Practical, the board dedicated to running them in practice, not on High Yield Shares & Strategies where discussions about whether HYP strategies (and other high-yield strategies) are a good idea or not are supposed to happen. I realise that the opponents might feel that HYP strategies are being advocated on HYP Practical, and that it's unfair to deny opponents the opportunity to present their opposing advocacy - but actually
neither advocacy for
nor advocacy against HYP strategies is about running HYP strategies in practice, so they're both off-topic on HYP Practical. The way to deal with advocacy for HYP strategies on HYP Practical is to report it for being off-topic, asking for it to be moved to High Yield Shares & Strategies where it can be replied to free of HYP Practical's restrictions, or alternatively reply on High Yield Shares & Strategies (*). But be careful to distinguish between advocacy and simple reporting of facts about how a HYP has done in practice. For example, a report that HYP1 has produced seriously good performance over the last 19 years and that this is highly satisfactory for its owner is reporting facts, not advocacy, but saying something like "I think every investor should use a HYP strategy - just look at how HYP1 has performed over 19 years" is advocacy just as much as "I think investors should avoid HYP strategies like the plague - just look at how unbalanced and risky HYP1 has become over the last 19 years".
Also, opponents often attack not just the HYP strategies but also their adherents, describing them as zealots, dogmatic, etc - which at least IMHO is a breach of at least the spirit of TLF's rules that "
To make this a valued and successful discussion forum, LemonFool asks all users to be respectful, understanding and helpful to other posters" and "
Robust debate is allowed, but it must remain polite and respectful at all times. Stick to the facts and argue the points discussed, rather than criticise the poster."
And somewhat lower-key, but still lacking respect IMHO, they pretend to knowledge about the adherents that they quite simply cannot possibly know. For example, they pretend to know that the adherents haven't considered the risks of the HYP strategy: all they actually know is that
either the adherents have failed to consider the risks
or the adherents have considered them, assessed how big they are and decided that they are small enough to be acceptable.
As for the question asked in the subject, my answer is basically that although I do assess the risks I am taking, I do
NOT want to be assessing those risks all the time: I have plenty of other things I want to do with my life! The board split on TMF back in the spring/early summer of 2008 was designed to give people a refuge from the habit that had developed on the original HYP board since the autumn of 2007 of diverting almost every discussion into an "are HYP strategies good or bad?" debate. The original HYP board became High Yield Shares & Strategies to avoid interrupting any such debates that were in progress at the time, and HYP Practical was created with a topic that explicitly excluded such debates (**). In principle, that meant that I and others like me could choose when I wanted to re-assess HYP strategies and their risks and when I didn't by choosing whether to read both boards or just HYP Practical. In practice, that worked quite well for a few months, but then the anti-HYP advocacy and anti-HYPer disrespect from opponents started creeping back into HYP Practical, and unfortunately was too often met with pro-HYP advocacy or simple indifference, both of which the opponents seem to have taken as encouraging them to take it further. Every now and then, they take it a bit further than that and things blow up, often with people on
both sides becoming a bit emotional about it. Then moderators crack down on the anti-HYP advocacy and anti-HYPer disrespect, and the problem looks to be sufficiently well resolved, so they relax things again - and the anti-HYP advocacy and anti-HYPer disrespect start creeping back again - and so the loop continues...
Frankly, the only way I see of breaking out of that loop is for the moderators to become a lot tougher with persistent offenders -
both those who needle HYPers by posting anti-HYP advocacy and anti-HYPer disrespect on HYP Practical
and those who reply with pro-HYP advocacy and anti-HYP-opponent disrespect there. Things like escalating up to a month-long ban from the board, with a warning that if the offender doesn't learn their lesson permanently and instead allows themselves to creep back into the offending type of posting after 'serving their time', next time the ban will be for life - and doing exactly that if the warning is ignored.
Note I'm
not saying that the moderators should do that, nor indeed that they shouldn't - just that if they don't, I see little hope of the loop being broken out of. I.e. for the admins and moderators, it's a question of whether that sort of rather draconian cure is better or worse than the disease of letting the loop continue, with its resulting drain on moderator time...
(*) This is a bit more work, but not much - and it does make a contribution to TLF in the form of saving the moderators unnecessary work. To do it, prepare a reply as usual, then rather than submitting it, copy it, shift to High Yield Shares & Strategies, press "Post New", paste the copy into the input box, choose and enter an appropriate title for the new thread (the original thread's title is often not very appropriate!) and submit. Or to be a bit more helpful to other users, add "From <link to original thread>:" at the top of the new post before submitting to make it easier to find what you're replying to, and post a brief reply on HYP Practical saying just "I have replied on <link to new post>." so that people know you have replied and can easily find your reply if they want to.
(**) To be precise, IIRC the exact TMF board names were "High Yield - Share Strategies" and "High Yield - HYP Practical", but I don't think that makes any real difference!
Gengulphus