Blog - Investing Notes

November 8, 2007 - Update: The Most Widely Considered Guru Opinions?

Which stock market experts intrigue investors and traders the most? To gain some insight regarding this question, we examine cxoadvisory.com log files over the past six months for visits derived from search engine inputs and for counts of visits to specific Guru Grades directories. Using the the top 50 log file results for these two approaches over the period 5/7/07-11/6/07, we find that:

The following chart summarizes the relative interest in guru names (with variants consolidated) derived from the top 50 search phrases visiting cxoadvisory.com via external search engines over the past six months. Bob Brinker is the runaway winner. The position of Jim Cramer is surprising, since his name came out on top the last time we did this analysis. Perhaps the competition for links to his name has grown.

Note that only those experts covered at cxoadvisory.com appear on this list and that the search engine ranking of cxoadvisory.com differs by expert, varying the odds of finding the site. Also, we first covered a few of these gurus since 5/7/07, biasing their relative frequencies downward.

Does a broader measure of site activity based on visits to directories look different?

The next chart summarizes relative interest in gurus derived from counts of visitors to the 50 most popular directories at cxoadvisory.com over the past six months. The names in this chart generally match the top-ranked names in the list above.

Is there any relationship between the level of interest in a guru and the guru's ability to forecast the behavior of the U.S. stock market as measured at Guru Grades?

The following scatter plot relates relative reader interest in an expert as measured above to the expert's accuracy in forecasting overall U.S. stock market behavior as measured at Guru Grades. There is a hint that increasing accuracy garners increasing interest, but the samples are too small and dispersed for any firm conclusions. Note that not all the experts covered above have forecasting accuracy grades.

In summary (alphabetically), Bob Brinker, Jim Cramer, Ken Fisher, Bill Fleckenstein, Mark Hulbert, Louis Navellier and Steve Sarnoff appear to be relatively influential among investors at large.

For related research on expertise, see Blog Synthesis: The Wisdom of Analysts, Experts and Gurus. See especially our blog entry of 10/31/07 for a different approach to measuring relative guru influence.