Sorkin blows interview with Robbins

Hamilton Nolan of Gawker is critical of the interview that New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin conducted with self-help guru Anthony Robbins about his investing advice.

Nolan writes, “As someone reading (or viewing a video of) an interview of Tony Robbins regarding his new book of money advice, you may have been interested to learn that actual knowledgeable financial experts pointed out, when the book came out, that Tony Robbins is generally full of shit, when it comes to money advice. Barry Ritholtz pointed out that Robbins has been giving provably awful money-losing investment advice as far back as 2010, and that the investment portfolio that Robbins recommends in his book falls prey to the ‘rookie mistake’ of containing all the stuff that has been doing very well very recently—the same stuff that, the principle of reversion to the mean tells us, will likely not do that well in that future. Ben Carlson put together an even more detailed critique of Robbins’ suggested portfolio, showing not only that it is not very inventive, but that he probably constructed it by cherry-picking things that had performed well in the past. That does not take an investment guru. Any idiot with a calculator can do that.

“In other words: Tony Robbins gives demonstrably bad investment advice, yet here he is selling a book full of investment advice. I would have been interested, as a reader of the business section of our nation’s most prestigious newspaper, to hear Tony Robbins respond to this critique. Instead, what we get is… this. An interview in which Andrew Ross Sorkin asks Tony Robbins nothing—nothing!—about the detailed factual criticisms of his book.”

Read more here.