Ann: Cleansing Notice and Shares Coming Out of Escrow, page-34

Yep, likening it to a club or almost family mentality is a good way of describing it. Once invested, people seem to think you need to be unconditionally loyal to the club or you're a traitor to be hated. As long as people are bullish, they are loved no matter how ridiculous what they say is. If they are bearish, they will unconditionally be hated. If you want to do well on the stock market you need to accept that you're sometimes going to have to be silent or hated, and if you want to avoid the hate you can only ever say positive things in a situation which is never going to be universally positive.

When it comes to trading or investing, we should never fall in love with a stock. I made no secret of the fact that I liked TNT (and I still like the fundamentals and management, though I'm growing somewhat dubious lately), but we should always be aware that companies and the market as a whole are dynamic and can change at any time and we need to be able to react to that change and be flexible in our thinking. We also need to remember that we can get things wrong. I'm really pleased that despite being so positive and bullish about TNT for so long, I wasn't too blind or stubborn to move when I saw the inevitable coming. I do wish I saw it sooner, but all in all I'm really pleased.

I'll keep watching TNT but I can not make a bull case at the moment no matter how hard I try. Positive guidance at this point will be met with scepticism. Even a strong quarterly in January would be unlikely to do much and I doubt we'll see that anyway - anything not comfortably exceeding $150M RRR will bring disappointment and scepticism about any company guidance. The market is irrationally concerned about dilution and TNT has plenty. Big acquisitions just throw doubt on organic growth claims and bring concerns about dilution (partly justified but also exceeding that). No acquisitions will make the company look stagnant.

If the story is as good as management promised, and it still may be, I don't see how they're going to demonstrate it in much under a year.