The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Something else I would like to mention, I also don't think that ADMIN should be talking about stocks or their picks.

Good point. This is actually part of a rule I imposed on myself at SI, legal liked it, tried to make it even more restrictive, then eventually backed it off to the way I wanted it to be.

My rule, and I stated it publicly a number of times, was that I would not (and Legal later made it "could not") take any position, long or short or options, in any companies actively discussed on the site. The closest I came to the edge on this rule was THDO, which I very actively (and quite profitably) traded for about 2 years. It had a board on SI but that board wasn't what I would consider "active". I was an occasional active participant in the THDO board on Yahoo, under an alias that didn't reveal that I was SI Bob. My posts there were sometimes opinions of the fundamentals, but mostly just calls of tops and bottoms based on what I'd learned of its patterns.

Being an active stock talk participant and being the Admin just don't mix. Actually, Legal at GNET for a while completely forbade me to trade in any stocks at all, but I finally got them to back off and let me trade ones that weren't actively discussed.

The problem is that the Admin, even if he's giving lots of assurances of no bias, can't afford to let there be a lot of speculation that he's biased or make people suspect that he may be booting someone for speaking ill of a stock he's long.

A person should either be overseeing the conduct of all the participants of a stock message board, or participating in the stock-related content, but not both.