I understood your point completely, the fact is it's not always (in fact, usually not) zero sum. Put another way, if I bought Microsoft from someone who flipped the IPO, who "lost" all the money I made? Or put yet another way, total market cap of the S&P 500 today is larger than the total market cap in, say, 1986. You could look it up. I'm not sure whether you missed my point that there are many ways of looking at the market, all of which deserve a hearing, or if you just don't want to respond to it.
As for all these "quality positive" posters who have made people money, there's no good way to quantify it but I suspect that Ms. Shell has saved people more money than these positive posters have contributed. It's true that most of the people gulled into buying scam stocks were too busy heaping vitriol on her to listen to what she had to say and get out, but some did. Add to that the greater number who the scam artists never had a chance to pull in because of the light that was shined on their activities, and the numbers add up.
As for "quality negative" posters driving down a stock price and creating a self fulfilling prophecy, that can work for both sides. If anything it works better on the long side where the potential increase from pumping the stock is greater than 100%.
And FWIW, Mr. Pink made his call on Conseco very early on.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
