I am sorry that you had someone that did not take their business seriously and took the time to learn their business enough to be able to respond to your questions, but you can not blame STE for that. The questions you asked were very easy to answer and it was unfortunate that your recruiter was unable to answer them.

Again, if anyone has real questions about the business model, I would be happy to help answer any questions that I can

Well, if you’re going to resort to insults…Sarbox is a common abbreviation for Sarbanes Oxley. It’s used in virtually every business forum, news outlet (ever catch CNBC or Bloomberg?) – From the first sentence of the wikipedia description: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Pub.L. 107-204, 116 Stat. 745, enacted ), also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002 and commonly called Sarbanes-Oxley, Sarbox or SOX” You work in Finance? I seriously doubt any existing Financial Analyst has never heard of Sarbox from a colleague, their management or by tuning into virtually any English language business outlet; is this really your profession? Not that it matters, but it’s odd that you would pick that out as something to criticize me for by saying that I clearly don’t work in business. It’s like me saying, “you seriously don’t know anything about the internet because you call it a ‘blog’, but it’s really a ‘weblog’ – I mean come on. And you drew the parallel between Financial Analysis of publicly held companies, not me (comment 3) – “When a Financial Analyst researches a company, we research many factors to determine the true value of a company.”

To be clear, I didn’t state that STE was “dying”. What I did was take a look at a meaningful trend (in my opinion) and deduced that the RATE OF GROWTH appeared to be slowing based on that input. This is a big distinction, one that your company’s notorious lawyer would potentially seek to exploit. So, for the record, I’m referring to the RATE of growth; I make no claims that the site does not continue to grow. My point was how FAST or SLOW it grows moving forward. The reason this is important is that as there are fewer new signees per existing member and as you exhaust your potential base of new recruits in the US since the adult cohort is roughly steady, it becomes more and more difficult (vs. early entrants comparatively speaking) to recruit new members later in the game. I assume as a Financial Analyst, you had to take a few semesters of college level calculus, so this is a second derivative context, not first derivative as I had stated earlier.

Has anyone EVER heard of Bernie Madoff? Seriously with this guy going to jail for life how can anyone join these MLM’s without realizing they are just “stealing” from the members below them which in most cases are people/friends they know?

I’m plenty secure with my degrees and financial acumen, so no need to delve into that here

Why do I need a “web portal” to go to bestbuy or target? Why not just go RIGHT to the webpage? Oh wait if you use the portal then I get a “cut” of my friends sign up fees.

OMG . . . No One is really clueless. Stealing from members? This is the problem with blogs…people have NO idea what they are talking about. The web-portal gets you cash back from Bestbuy and target. The money comes from the store. I think EVERYONE knows that . . . .