Replies to post #51015 on China Growth Stocks

[putsbootycall]

I think it is appropriate to call someone a basher when they feel the necessity to post multiple and continuous negative comments on multiple boards...often the same negative comments repeated on multiple boards and sometimes with different handles. It comes across as if the basher has a campaign they are running.

[value1008]

"Bashers"-- Joe, i'll speak for myself and say that it's one thing to post something negative or "trashy" about a stock's technical behavior or short-term prospects. It's quite another thing to say, as many chronic short-sellers do, "this company is a scam POS, dead man walking," and "its stock is eventually going to zero," as, for instance, John Bird often asserts.

That's a deceitful scare tactic and yes, is a form of bashing to dissuade other investors from taking a long position that will deleteriously affect the shortseller's own invested short position.

Obviously, when Bird or someone is trying to make the case for shorting a stock like CCME, which is already heavily beaten down in valuation to a trailing P/E of about 5 and a forward P/E of somewhere around 3.3, that's NOT a case of sanely helping to bring an insanely over-valued equity down to earth, like bringing CREE down from a trailing P/E of 105 in 2009 down to a more reasonable P/E of 35 in Sep. 2010. No, it's an attempt to DESTROY a stock and wipe out the holdings of a lot of careful "long" investors who've done a lot of d.d. to avoid taking unsafe positions and have preferred to invest in an undervalued, not-yet-popular, but robustly-growing company's stock-shares.

Short-sellers can't, except with great difficulty, destroy large-cap or medium-cap companies. So they prey like wolves on more vulnerable young smallcap companies. They don't play fair, but use whatever dirty tricks to win their sordid little game.

Former SEC official Robert Shapiro has gone on record a few times to state that illegal naked shorting has unjustly destroyed hundreds of companies. Bashing via persistent trash talk on message boards, slanted "tabloid journalism" pieces from accomplice shills, frivolous lawsuits, and yes, even SEC "investigations" launched by insiders at that institution who want to cozy up with the shortie hedge funds after they leave their posts (i.e., the "revolving door" syndrome) are all part of this dirty game. It stinks. It's unjust. And it's quite injurious to sincere investors and to the hard-working folks who start and run and back these businesses.

What we're witnessing is like a street-crime mugging, only in this case it's "crime in the suites" by some very shady characters.

So let's be careful about our motives when "bashing" a stock. And, IMO, it would help to clarify the context (short-term, medium or long-term) when we speak negatively about a stock's weaknesses and chart patterns.

Thanks for listening....