He had gone out to dinner with friends the night before
and realized that none of them -- "I mean nobody" --
believed the statements coming out of Apple PR about
Steve Jobs' health. "As good as the company is," he wrote,
"I just can't own a stock when I don't believe the company
is being straight with investors."
He called Apple out for lying about Jobs' health (they were lying) and sold all his shares. Hardly an indictment of his investing skill.
"I don't regret my decision to sell $aapl."
"When I think the company is misleading investors, I
don't want to be a shareholder, no matter how much
appreciation there might be in the future."
He was right when he said that devs should pick Android if they want to be 'in front of the most eyeballs', but he was clearly wrong on the relative value of those eyeballs.
No matter how noble the strategy, poor returns are poor returns, and your returns are your record of investing skill.
The counterpoint would be that selling the AAPL shares allowed the capital to be invested in some other venture that had better returns, not the 'nobility' of the strategy.
> No matter how noble the strategy, poor returns are poor returns, and your returns are your record of investing skill.
No, skill is how well you achieve your objectives. If your objectives are not limited to financial returns, then financial returns alone are not a reliable proxy for skill.
You may think it sounds obvious, but that assertion is hugely controversial within the finance / economics fields. The big argument on the other side is that basically no one shows "serially correlated" returns (in other words, people who do well one year tend to not do well the following year, when if success indicated skill you'd expect them to do well year after year).
His reason for selling was that he was (it turns out rightly) concerned about Jobs' health and didn't feel that Apple was behaving honestly with its investors w/r/t the public statements about it. http://avc.com/2009/01/selling-apple-a/
So consider the track record.