Merkado Barkada received a mention yesterday from Stephen “Steveinomics” Cuunjieng during his appearance on Michell Ong’s "Market Watch" program on ANC. The name drop happens at roughly the 56:50 mark of the June 4 edition of "Market Edge" (YouTube link) at the tail end of a segment where Mr. Cuunjieng discussed his take on PHINMA [PHN 20.70, down 5.3%; 360% avgVol]. My name comes up because Ms. Ong was joking with Mr. Cuunjieng that his mention of PHN’s name ruined the “blind item” approach that the program had hoped to take with the discussion, and Mr. Cuunjieng responded by saying that he “has no dealings with PHINMA”, and went on to say that he’s “not Merkabo Barkada who doesn’t say who he is or what he does.” He added: “Full disclosure, I have no business with [PHINMA].”
> “Dada, you got dissed on live TV!” That was my son’s analysis of my big moment when I showed him the clip after school. I often watch Market Edge, but I didn’t get a chance to catch this one, so I heard about the mention in the most unnerving way possible: through private messages from people saying, “Have you seen Market Edge today??” For the record, I think it’s awesome that I got mentioned and that lots of people who read my work saw it and reached out to have a laugh. It was a bit of fun on an otherwise boring day on the market. I take the whole thing as a badge of honor. Not only does Mr. Cuunjieng know about me, but when he mentions my name, my own personal TV hero Michelle Ong just laughed along knowingly. No “who?” or looks of confusion. That’s real!
> Full disclosure: The interesting part of this exchange for me is that Mr. Cuunjieng’s great analysis of PHN happened without any disclaimers or disclosures about his level of involvement with the company, and his disclosures seemed to only arise in response to Ms. Ong’s joke at the end. It’s possible that – without that joke – Mr. Cuunjieng could have ended the rushed segment without ever mentioning that he has no interest or involvement in PHN. Would anyone have noticed? Would it have changed his analysis? My contention is that it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Hearing him say that he has no involvement didn’t change my consumption of his analysis. Besides, how am I to verify anything that Mr. Cuunjieng says on this point? The content was good on its own.
> On my anonymity: I come from a family that likes to maintain a low profile, so maintaining my anonymity is critical to keeping that low profile intact. The platform that I’ve built over the past five years (!) has brought me into contact with so many great people that I’d love to meet and talk with in person, and it has opened so many doors for me to attend big events or appear on big programs to talk about my views on the market. But I’ve turned each of these personal and professional opportunities down in order to preserve that peace of mind for my family. I’m clear about this with my readers, and I’m aggressive in the ways that I try to signal which parts of my content are “facts” and which are “opinions” to help my readers better consume the parts that technically come from an anonymous writer like me.
> Still not Matteo Guidicelli: There was a brief period of time where ChatGPT would claim that MB was written by Matteo Guidicelli. Some other days it will say different names. I just checked right now and it said that I’m actually Matthew Cabangon, and it was pretty sure about that.
> On my holdings: I used to disclose the stocks that I owned, but I stopped this practice after the volume of emails that I would need to deal with from readers became too much to deal with. I’m a long-term investor. I’ve been very open about my general thesis (capitalizing on multi-decade growth of the middle class), but the buys and sells that I make on the handful of stocks that I own are often done according to reasoning that would be hard for me to effectively update. Publicly, I’ve mentioned that I bought AREIT in the high 20s during its post-IPO dip and then again during that block sale dump last year. If someone copied me and bought AREIT at the same time, how would they know the criteria that I used to make that purchase or the particular set of circumstances that informed my purchase of a REIT in that quantity? This is why I don’t post what I own, and instead, I openly disclose that I’m an anonymous writer with unknown holdings and tell readers to consume my content with that in mind.
MB bottom-line: If I did a true audit of all the financial information that I read in a day, I feel like only maybe 20% of the things I read are attached to a real name. I’m not talking about the reporting of facts, but the casual analysis and bits of info that I read on Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, and pick up through contacts in the real world. When a friend says “I heard from a guy that XYZ company is looking to delist”, I don’t know the name of that “guy”. I might know his connection to XYZ company or I might not. And the truth is, aside from broker-generated analysis, I just don’t read much that is signed. And even when I read a signed report, it’s very rare for the writer of that report to openly disclose their involvement (or non-involvement) in a particular stock. So where does that leave us? Well, for me, I’m just happy to know that Mr. Cuunjieng and Ms. Ong have enough knowledge of me to casually joke about me on-air. That’s definitely fun.
--
Merkado Barkada is a free daily newsletter on the PSE, investing and business in the Philippines. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow on Twitter to receive the full daily updates.