Fool Rival Investor Village Commits Sucide!
March 28, 2009
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FYI - I was locked out of my account for a couple weeks (during the rally) here at Fool for making fun of GoodVibes. I said GV was talking to and Recing himself and explained why. The Post, Badvibes from Goodvibes had 50 Recs, so the idea appears to have had some support here in Fooldom.
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Another rival site Investor Village just committed sucide. Gary Weiss has the story. It involves one of Fool's Favorite punching bags Overstock.com. One of the first blogs/pitches that made me think Fool was an honest broker of information was TMFBent and Everydays pitch on Overstock.
Investors are desperate for HONEST information on stocks/investing. Most of the major brokerages and analyst are inept or corrupt or LIARS, so Fool and others provide a refuse for those to come share information and rant.
Another great site for some finance/economy wisdom: / http://garyweiss.blogspot.com
Message Board Positions Itself as Megaphone For Stock Touts
Ralph "Kramden" Kidd has a new business model in the works
As I've described in the past, the Investor Village message board has distinguished itself in the cause of investor poverty. It was a prime sounding board for perpetrators of the Novastar Financial subprime lending disaster, allowing investor hype to
run rampant (as in
this notorious post), to the point of drawing
media attention. It was a forum for cyberstalking by
Overstock.com's nauseating p.r. director Judd Bagley.
A couple of years ago, this ostensibly neutral investor forum
banned white collar crime fighter Sam Antar from the
Overstock.com message board for the crime of pestering CEO Patrick Byrne and Bagley with -- horrors! -- questions. He was first restricted to three posts a day, and then removed completely.
The move deprived investors of an opportunity for Antar to directly confront Byrne about his lies and accounting trickery. Overstock shares hit a high of $19 the month Antar was silenced. It's now trading at about $10.50, and has been much lower. Thank you, Investor Village!
But such ham-handed suppression of criticism is evidently insufficient to make Investor Village an antiseptic environment for corporate CEOs and their shills, and suitably hostile to critics.
Investor Village recently
banned one of the few critical voices on the Overstock board,
immediately after posting a response to Byrne on the message board. The response was deleted. No explanation was given. A message
gloating about that was
recommended by Bagley ("De Daumier Smith").
As a result, the board supposedly devoted to Overstock instead is dominated with nutty rants about everything but, and is silent on such material corporate events as its change in auditors. With its scant ranks of critics depleted, that subject has not been broached, and Byrne can now rant and rave without contradiction, at least from one persistent critic.
In an email to members, the site recently revealed that a new feature will allow users, including corporate managers like Byrne, to go back and delete or edit posts, forever and ever: "Unlimited Post Deletion and Editing, allowing you to correct mistakes when you need to." Since Byrne frequently changes his public announcements, as Lee Webb of Stockwatch has
described, he can be expected to make good use of this new cover-your-tracks feature when he blurts out some incriminating admission, as he has in the past.
Cozy! Investor Village's operators, rather oddly it seemed at the time,
anonymized its site registration a couple of year ago. Maybe it's not so odd after all.
Now, here's the funny part: Investor Village, which evidently hasn't made a go of it (don't ask me why), actually wants to start charging people.
The Rest is
here: http://garyweiss.blogspot.com
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