Bashers are Just Misunderstood Good Samaritans?

From the I*Hub PAVC board:

(P.S. IMHO- These two clowns are a tag team comedy act- bash, bash and bash till they buy in and then pump, pump and pump)

Posted by: im a survivor
In reply to: shortsinthesand who wrote msg# 11098 Date:8/21/2006 1:36:54 PM
Post #of 11134

ON TOPIC FOR ANY BOARD!!!!!!

Did you catch this piece on message boards? Quite interesting reading, imo.....Note the portion in bold, although the whole article is a good read.....long, short, doesnt matter....great article, imo...

A Requiem for the message boards
Once a boards enthusiast, our columnist explains why he's had it.
By David Futrelle

If you ever feel like making a lot of enemies in a hurry, wander onto the message boards at Yahoo!, Silicon Investor or Raging Bull and say something less than flattering about, oh, any stock you feel like. It doesn't matter if that company's CEO has fled to the Caymans with his hairdresser and a briefcase full of Ben Franklins. If you persist in your criticism for more than a post or two, you'll quickly find yourself the least popular person at the party. In fact, you'll find yourself labeled a "basher"--roughly the equivalent of being charged with high treason.

Stock message boards have long been celebrated as a democratizing force in the world of finance. This is a crock. They are democracies only if you share the same rosy opinions as everyone else there. Whenever a basher speaks up (and basher, mind you, is liberally defined--it can apply not just to a poster who accuses a company chairman of pedophilia but to anyone who might note that 120 times earnings is an awful lot to pay for a share of Cisco) you can be sure that someone (or a half-dozen someones) will tear into him with all the subtlety of Mao's Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

It's a truism on the boards that anyone who has anything critical to say about a company must be a short-seller (an investor who has placed a bet that a stock will go down rather than up). Perhaps this is true. But many basher-bashers have also convinced themselves that most stock critics are the minions of vast (usually unnamed) short-selling cabals that pay handsomely for pessimistic posts. Various documents purporting to explain "How Bashers Get Paid" circulate widely. One claims that bashers are paid (by whomever or whatever it is that pays them) according to the number of replies their posts generate. "A basher will attempt to milk three to five replies per post at one to two dollars each," says the anonymous text.

Basher paranoia is somewhat more understandable on the penny-stock boards, where stock manipulation is rampant. But there the real problem isn't the bashers--it's the boosters. In a pump-and-dump scheme, hypesters buy a worthless stock, tout it incessantly and then dump their holdings for a quick profit after enough suckers have piled on. Strangely enough, while the Securities and Exchange Commission has brought plenty of cases against Net pump-and-dumpers in the past few years, it has yet to find a single bash-for-pay conspiracy in action.

Since they stand to gain when others lose, it is easy to demonize stock bashers and short-sellers, to see them as "black of heart," as Wall Street wag Fred Schwed put it in his 1940 classic Where are the Customers' Yachts? After all, isn't it somehow un-American to hope a company fails, somehow evil to want a stock to go down? Maybe so, but even Schwed affirmed that a wide diversity of opinions on stocks is better than a single Pollyannaish view. "Dictatorships always immediately ban short-selling, since it is axiomatic that no professional pessimists are going to be tolerated," Schwed quipped at a time when Americans had good reasons to worry about foreign dictators. "But whatever the reader may think of totalitarian philosophy in general, I do not think he will envy them for the condition of their security markets."

Just three or four years ago, stock message boards promised to become a liberating force, a public forum free from the tyranny of the experts, where investors could go to compare notes on stocks and hash out disagreements about valuations. Today the boards can only be regarded as a failed experiment. Remember the so-called Iomegans at the Motley Fool during the late 1990s--the herd of investors who convinced themselves that a small computer disk-drive manufacturer in Utah was the next Microsoft and then proceeded to follow the stock off a cliff? That may have been the first indication that stock evaluation is not best done by committee. And these days it's hard to find any message board that hasn't degenerated into an embarrassing squabble between dogmatic longs and beleaguered (if equally dogmatic) shorts. For most serious investors, it can finally be said: Stock message boards are an utter and total waste of time.

At its root, the boards' problem rests with their mix of unquestioning, optimistic conviction and intolerance of dissent. These are two qualities you can find in many moments of America at its worst. The mandatory positivity many posters want to enforce is reminiscent of the blandly dogmatic (and thus menacing) Boosters' Clubs satirized by Sinclair Lewis in his 1922 novel Babbitt. The clubs, fraternal organizations for gung-ho local businessmen, offered "Booster Brothers" a place they go could go to exchange business cards and snappy pleasantries--so long as they didn't suggest that anything was less than peachy keen. Never was heard a discouraging word--it was practically in the bylaws. There was quite a bit of this sort of boosterism in the '20s. You may recall how that decade ended.

http://www.money.com/money/depts/websmart/webwatch/archive/000725.html