Bob Brinker Advisor Reviews
Bob Brinker Advisor Customer Reviews
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What, do you think this is magic? Do you think he is going to get it right everytime. There are
no psychics in Finance. There are educated, experienced people who make their best guess based on the aforementioned attributes.
Yes, Jimmy Carter is a nice guy who is doing great things for the homless but he sucked as a president. How anyone can respect Bill Clinton for anything other than being a shyster, you must be blinded by your own partisianship. Yes, George Bush was a great let down. Are there any real statesman left in this country???
I've listened for over 10 years. To sum up Mr. Brinker's work, as with almost anyone with such a long history, in one blog statement or a 5-star rating system is asking for distortions and omissions. But I will attempt a quick distillate.
His market timing advice has been hit or miss. The calls in January of 2000 to get out and in March 2003 to get back in were both outstanding. He missed this 2007-8 call but so did many others without insider info on the banks.
John Bogel called this downturn a Black Swan"" (Mr. Black Swan himself, N. Taleb did not miss this!) but if you follow the advice of most investment pros including very respected guys like John Bogel, Burton Malkeil, Buffet, etc., they would have you ""buy and hold"" anyway. In other words, a ""BB miss"" is a default play by these other ""buy and hold"" guys. Either way, you are following the advice of respected guys with good to great track records. During a bear market, the advice seems especially bad!
The other personal finance advice BB doles out (e.g. info regarding insurance, annuities, mortgage, credit card, etc...) has largely been excellent.
Aside from his recommendation that you avoid gold (which I can see why - every gold bug in the world would call incessantly), his advice has been invaluable to me personally. It has taught me the correct way to approach and think about personal finance.
As for his political views, overall I agree that he is right-leaning, as are most of your Wall St. Journal types. This is not that surprising - it goes along with their indoctrination and their friends - most are greedy types who view taxes and government regulation as co-enemy number one.
But, perhaps more revealing, BB's right-ish diatribes play to his listening demographic - middle to upper-middle class white males. This is the demographic Republican strategist Frank Luntz correctly predicted that tax and personal finance issues would hold strong appeal. BB is just preaching to his demographic core listener - this is a business strategy.
What is insulting to my intelligence was his insistence that he was independent while launching Limbaugh-esque attacks on Hillary, Obama and Ron Paul.
I am no fan of Hillary but his incessant use of the pejorative ""Evita"" and his defense of McCain was nauseating. His out-of-hand dismissals of Ron Paul almost made me write a letter to ABC. BB's hero worship of Paul Volker was stunningly met with silence when it was learned that Volker endorsed and worked with Obama. Since BB works for ABC radio, sometimes it is difficult to state accurately whether his political comments reflect his views or those of his ABC bosses (Disney) who have profited handsomely under Bush Administration legislation on copyright matters.
Lastly, his adherence to the notion that Nuclear Energy is ""the"" answer. While I am pro-Nucs I am not blind to the problems with Nucs. Nor am I blind to the contradictions both he and Dr. Bill make regarding Nuclear Power.
First, there is an insurance issue. No one in the US will insure nuclear plants - too big of a liability.
Second, Even foreign plants have enormous cost overruns! Another reason Wall Street investors steer clear - not profitable enough to pursue.
Third, Dr. Bill would have you believe that recycled spent fuel rods are necessary and such a procedure would only produce a little bit of bad stuff. That bad stuff is Plutonium and can only be used for 1 thing - bombs - it is very dangerous.
Furthermore, Dr. Bill dismisses nuclear waste as a non-issue... it is a huge issue. I do not recall BB or Dr. Bill proposing an iron clad and universally accepted solution to this problem.
My mother studied graduate level nuclear physics at Yale and Duke. I majored in physics. We both understand the pros and cons of nuclear power. While I favor it over coal, it has problems and the ""glossing over"" of these problems by BB and Dr. Bill is a bit disingenuous."
Now Brinker is repeating the lie that United Auto Workers in the U.S. are paid $70+ per hour in wages and benefits.
That $70+ number was calculated once upon a time by factoring in all of the CURRENT RETIREE PAYOUTS into the CURRENT WORKFORCE'S hourly pay.
C'mon, Bob. Go back to ocassionally crediting the Dems and Bill Clinton with outperforming your Republican heros and maybe your stock market calls will start to improve, too.
The more Bob Brinker bashed Hillary Clinton over her position on the economy during the past year, the more her assessment for what to do has become the best recourse available and the worse Bob's market calls became.
It must be a virus running through RightWing talk radio. Even Bob's replacement, Bill Flannigan, has caught it. Today he said (seemingly with a straight face) that Jimmy Carter was the worst president of his lifetime"".
This, coming at the end of these last eight years of total domestic and foreign policy meltdown at the hands of Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.
Even Forbes Magazine in their most recent ranking of ""Presidents and Prosperity"" (you can find it with a google search on that phrase) ranked Jimmy Carter 4th among presidents who served at least one full 4-year term since FDR.
The only Republican that ranked fractionally higher than Jimmy Carter on Forbes' ""Presidents and Prosperity"" list was Ronald Reagan...largely because Reagan kept the same brilliant Fed Chairman, Paul Volker, that Carter appointed and stayed the course on Carter's/Volker's policies."
BRINKER is an IDIOT. He bashed the DEMs and never predicted the Bear MKT. He was totally clueless and a LIAR TO BOOT.
I stopped listening to this DMBASS when the market started to TANK.
I will never listen to that AHOLE again.
Brinker mentions his free recomend reading list almost every week. If you read, you'll find out the Market Timing is risky.
If you've listened to the guests on Brinker's show, you've hear some contridictions to what Brinker says. If you will hear Brinker tell you not to do things you don't understand, not to listen to gurus.
The show is talk about money.
Don't assume comments on this site are accurate, including mine. I've listen to money talk weekly for 6 years. Some things attributed to Brinker here were said by callers, not Brinker.
As to bashing politicians, Brinker points out things thinks are mistakes, regardless of party. He has consistantly blamed both parties for the current situation, naming names and actions.
He did not take sides in the election. He discussed possible consequences of proposed actions of each candidate. That's what I expect from a show called Money Talk.
He was at it again this weekend. Now he is repeating the Rush Limbaugh spin about how the Democrats just might take a notion any minute now to confiscate your 401K"".
I swear, he connected the dots from one economist's comment at a Congressional hearing...to Argentina confiscating pension funds...to ""not a great leap to assume Congress is seriously contemplating this"" to TELLING his listeners their 401ks might be confiscated by Congress any minute now.
I should have stopped listening to him after the third or fourth weekend he spent trashing Hillary Clinton during the primaries as ""Evita"" and then assured us it was not in his nature to be politically partisan."
Bob Brinker was blinded by his pro-Republican parisanship this year and that's why he missed calling the banking collapse.
He spent the primaries bashing Hillary Clinton (on the assumption that she would be most likely to beat the Republican nominee). And now he tells his audience every week that the crisis was caused by Democratic President Bill Clinton signing the legislation that eliminated Glass-Steagall.
But he NEVER tells his audience that legislation was handed to Bill Clinton by the Republican controlled Congress of 1999 with an OVERWHELMING VETO PROOF MAJORITY support from the House (84% to 15%) and the Senate (90% to 9%). Bill Clinton couldn't have prevented that legislation from passing even if he hated it.
I consider his persistent ommission of that critical detail to be a shameful partisan lie.