You shouldn’t trust anyone. No newsletter writer, no stock tout website, no Twitter pundit. The phrase ‘do your own due diligence’ is said often as a defense by people who are telling you to buy or sell stocks because they don’t want you to sue them when you lose money taking their advice having not read the fine print disclosure that reveals how much they were paid and how conflicted they are.

Our disclosures are simple: We own the stock or we don’t, the company we’re talking about is client or it isn’t. We don’t tell you to buy. We don’t tell you to sell. We are a part of your due diligence.

Companies pay us to keep them in our attention span, because not doing so means being out of the conversation, and that leaves a company as just another ticker on the outside looking in.

But when those companies pay us to discuss them, they don’t receive any automatic pass. We’re clear with them about this: they have to hit the milestones they’ve laid out, they have to run their company as a business and not a promotion, they have to do what they said they would do when they invited you to be a part owner.

If they don’t, we’ll be the ones hitting first and hardest. That’s important to us – and to the companies involved – because only then will you believe us when we say nice things about those companies.

That’s what’s made us so successful. We’re not promoters. We’re the ones who keep the promoters honest.

As a rule, and due to ethical concerns, we do not short any stock, be it companies we write about, do business with, or otherwise. The moment we start shorting, it becomes impossible for our readers to be clear on our motives. So if we beat on a company, it’s because we believe it needs a beating – not because someone paid us to go negative, or because we will get some commercial benefit out of it.

If you’re a first time commenter, you’re going to have to wait for a moderator to see your comment and approve it. Second time around there’s no restriction, but we’ve all seen what a gong show chatrooms and messageboards can turn into, and we’re not interested in setting up yet another place where people can burn each other. Be constructive, or be gone.

Absolutely. Sometimes we’ll believe the hype too much, or cut a company too much slack, or sometimes a company just doesn’t pan out like we thought it should. It happens. When it does, we’ll be up front about it. Nobody’s perfect, but we’re content that our track record demonstrates this is an exceedingly rare event.

No. You’re welcome to join our mailing list, and you’ll get some exclusive content now and then. But we won’t beat you down with newsblasts when you do so, nor sell your information on, and we don’t charge you for that ringside seat.