Who’s Your Mentor – Biased Investor or Unbiased Non-Investor?

Manshu of Onemint wrote an excellent post about who you should listen to. Being an online blogger and market trader I could very easily relate to most of his points but one point that stood out was

Stop listening to people with heavy biases.

The question is how do you judge if someone is heavily biased?

According to me there are two groups of people who talk about stocks. First those who themselves invest in stock and second those who don’t invest in stock but do the research for some clients.

If you listen to the person who has not invested in stock (assuming he is not restricted to invest in those stock by some corporate governance) but just tracks it for his clients would mean he himself is not confident about his own research. In short he could make more money selling his research rather investing with that research.

If you listen to person who has invested in a stock, he could be biased towards that stock.

In equity market, most people have bias towards stock they are holding and that is one of the main reason I don’t prefer sharing stocks I hold (to the extent I can and yet remain transparent with my trades) because then it could be taken the wrong way that I am pushing people to buy my stocks.

So finally my question is – Who do you prefer as a mentor – slightly biased yet investor in stock or unbiased yet no risk taken of his own money? Share your views in comments below.