The Question and Answer Board

[Was (Bob)]

I agree the boards should belong to the shareholders

I strongly disagree. Even vehemently. I find that statement more than a little offensive.

If I'm in the message-board reading phase of my DD (and that's but one part of the DD package), I want shareholders to tell me why they're shareholders and I want non-shareholders to tell me why they're not.

If I listen only to shareholders, I'm only getting one side of the picture. If a company were perfect, everyone would be shareholders and all I'd see is why they're shareholders. After all, they're shareholders because their opinions are positive.

Companies aren't perfect, and if I don't find out about the negatives, I'm not getting the whole picture.

And to add to what someone else said (and I've said a number of times in the past), shareholders post positively about a company because they want others to buy it and people who post negatively about a company do so because they don't want others to buy it. To say that the latter group is evil and the former isn't, by definition, is the worst kind of folly.

In fact, altruism is often (not the same as "always") the reason behind posting of negative opinions. You may or may not believe it (I doubt you do), but can you also say that altruism is often the reason behind posting of positive opinions?

I know when I've had negative things to say about companies (as I often did before accepting the position at Silicon Investor), my motives were 100% altruistic. I didn't benefit from prices dropping or not going up. I benefited from later seeing that I was proven right and that a number of people were saved financial harm.

That said, I personally do have a problem with the way "bashers" sometimes conduct themselves, but it's more a matter of approach than anything else. When I had something negative to say about a company, I didn't come down to the level of the more vehement posters and get vitriolic about it or engage in name-calling. Instead, I preferred to present my views in a level-headed, unemotional manner and hope that people who were intelligent enough to heed matter-of-fact posts more closely than emotional ones would pay attention and benefit from it.

I don't think that overly-emotional posting, be it positive or negative, reflects well on the poster or their opinions. Personally, I tend to discount anything market-related that's said too emotionally.

Questions?