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The success of the newsletter, however, owes as much to showmanship as scholarship. Granville selected Holly Hill as his home base "because it sticks in people's mind." The city is actually just a suburb of Daytona, but he says, "There is nothing romantic about the words Daytona Beach." He crisscrosses the U.S., annually addressing 200 investment seminars. His 2½-hour lecture is a circus of ventriloquism, juggling and bikini-clad girls. He tosses about biblical exhortations like: "As Matthew says, 'The Eye is the Lamp of the Body!' If my eye is on the right things, the market rewards me." And sometimes there is bizarre advice: sell California real estate fast because the San Andreas Fault is about to part "like a Talon zipper right down the coast some time after May 1981." He is now having a chimpanzee trained to play his theme song, The Bagholder's Blues, on the piano. Granville does not charge for these appearances. Instead, he views them as chances to sign up additional subscribers for the newsletter.
Granville's gaudiness offends many stock market professionals, although they have to recognize his good track record. Some charge that he has turned the investment advisory service into cheap entertainment. Granville often conveniently forgets that he was unabashedly bullish during the long market slide of 1973 and 1974. Says one critic: "Joe gives the appearance of being infallible. The next time he is wrong, he'll take a lot of unsophisticated investors down with him."
Dismissing his critics as "losers," Granville audaciously insists that his work will win him the Nobel Prize in economics. "I was reading an article about the twelve most powerful men in the world," he gloats. "I'll bet not one of them ever moved the market 5 points in one day. I moved it 31 points."
The man who moves markets and has become a millionaire in the process does not invest in the market himself. Granville argues that no analyst should own stock because that would influence his judgments of the market.