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HJ, I’d like to first answer your question. I got out of Casey mostly when it was taken over by Stansberry. I’ve just subscribed to Crisis Investing with Casey, which appears to be a resumption of the old “Crisis INvestor” newsletter. Very entertaining and informative. They choose unusual investing locales such as Zimbabwe. What’s very cool though is that not only do they find you investments allowing you to take advantage of the crisis opportunities, but they often point you to NYSE listed companies that will allow you to take advantage of the opportunities. I have an investing account that allows me to hit a number of different stock exchanges, but it’s still not as easy as you think. First you have to fund that currency by buying units of the currency in your default currency. If you’re not careful, your currency may be spread out in Yen, HK Dollars, etc. Anyhow, I just started it but I’ve enjoyed it so far; we’ll see if the investments pan out.
I began looking for a social networking site that might be geared toward people with a similar mindset. The closest thing I found was liberty.me, which is a libertarian-oriented social networking site. It is now free, though it used to charge an annual fee. People exchange ideas, write blogs, and have forum discussions. There is a discussion section for travel and five-flags-type ideals, but it is not regularly frequented (perhaps one post a month). I got a couple of good tips about an upcoming trip to Chile, but that was about it. It has a lot of potential, but mostly it seems to be about people wanting to discuss theory.
Q Wealth Reports is another interesting site. It has reports that come on an unannounced and irregular basis. However, some of the things they post is interesting, such as an anonymous rechargeable bank card. There’s an annual fee, maybe about $100. No real forum to speak of, but the content is decently interesting, though sporadic.
Going back to the SMC forum, I just got a notification of the new SMC site. It must not be without its bumps, because currently not only are my user name, email and password not recognized, but there’s no way to get a new password sent because it acts like I’m not there. In the past, SMC tended to roll out a new site before it was ready for primetime, so I expect that’s the case. There’s also an implication in the email that there may be a forum just for Total Access members. That seems to confirm my sense that Simon was going to target his products to a narrower, more lucrative subset of original members. That said, everyone I’ve met at the last two events (one SMC, the other “TA”) has been extremely interesting, and I’d love to frequent a forum in which those types of members actively participate.
HJ:
For better or worse, I think Sovereign Man has made the decision to focus more efforts on its higher-end clientele. That is, focus on folks coming to the SMC events, and focus even more on the Total Access members. Perhaps Simon is putting into place the 80/20 principle, and believes that the top 20 percent of the SMC members are resulting in 80 percent of the company’s profits. From meeting fellow members like you at Cancun, and TA members in Medellin, I can tell you that those groups are the most motivated, high-functioning, and high-producing members. So if I could earn more money from 300-500 of the Total Access members than I could with 10,000 with the regular members doing the day to day events, I can sympathize with that. I wouldn’t have thought the costs of maintaining a forum were high, though I do note that when Porter Stansberry bought out a lot of Doug Casey’s assets, he immediately nixed the International Man forum. The IM forum was very informative, entertaining and, best of all, FREE.
ML, happy to help. As you’ll see by searching around a bit, we started this labor of love a number of years ago, and then forgot it for a long time, obviously not bothering to terminate the web hosting renewal charges! However, hopefully this can be something fun to use at no cost if we can get some participation going. Please, feel free to post about your interests.
Thanks. I think it looks pretty nice! By the way, take another shot at the forum regarding length. It should be fixed, but I want to see if it gives enough space. Still too slow, but working on that as well.
I don’t have a 50 character limit. What do you mean? Let me know and I can see what I can do to fix.
I’ll take a bit of a wait and see approach. Still a lot of potential, but lots of history they’ve got to overcome.
