Jennifur ... a fair comment on inet's investment, until you look more closely at what he wrote (in full) about it:
"OH I,m not innocent. I was in a penny stock in 1999,that advertised great promise,and invested a thousand bucks. They were scheduled for an auto show in Orlando in Feb of 2000.Since it was a fairly local company.I dropped in on them unannounced. The first words I got was Peter Lynch was here yesterday. I didn't like what I saw,( I guess Lynch didn't either) so just before the show (after boo koo advertising) the price skyrocketed to high of $49. a share. I cleared $38 grand out of it ,then pi44ed most of it away on Loch. That company was practically history 2 years later.For that matter I was not even aware of chat boards at that time,so I had no geniouses guiding me."
It sounds to me as if inet had more than a vague suspicion that all wasn't as it seemed with that company. They had Peter Lynch's name to toss out ... loch had the Christians, father and son.
But only inet can say if he suffered even a qualm about riding it up when he "didn't like what he saw."
However, that's really beside the point, which is loch/cdex. With loch, as far back as the Jonathon Weil article in early 2000 it was clear what loch was up to. You say "had you bought low and sold high you wouldn't have known that your gain was based on deceit/false information". That's true, if you'd sold right at the top, just before the Weil expose. But if you bought low and held on through that high, for more than a couple of weeks, assuming you did even basic DD even then, you'd have had ample evidence that there was something very rotten in Denmark (or Croatia, as it were).
And fast-forwarding to the MP era, I've always found it incomprehensible that you, who seem so intelligent and knowledgable about business, would believe that MP was anything other than the same kind of charlatan as his predecessors.
Almost as incomprehensible as the fact that you (as you've said) contributed as a pp investor.
I'm all for giving the benefit of the doubt, but surely you would have engaged MP is some direct dialogue somewhere along the way and felt, as inet put it, that you didn't like what you saw -- that all was "not quite right." If you didn't do that, how can you say you did thorough DD?
I'm not trying to attack you, jennifur, or back you into a corner. But I think you'll have to agree that many posters have painted a very ugly picture, even after the loch daze, that even you couldn't ignore. "Ambiguity" and "nothing indicative"? How can you say that?
In any case, it'll soon be behind everyone. Hopefully some lessons, most of them expensive, learned.