Dave, you are just plain dead wrong. Individuals do not have equal access to info, and anyone that tells you otherwise is selling something. If you call up a company, the amount of information they provide you is very uneven. Some people will be able to talk with the CFO. Others will call and get an IR person who doesn't know anything. Read some of the comments from people that said they were told the gist of press releases days before they were released. And yet this is really small stuff compared to the crap that goes on all the time. How about the big networker that gives private meetings to more select groups of analysts, giving them information that is substantially different that the info released to the general population? [This just happened]
I do lots of research on my investments and I come up with my own decisions and use analyst's interpretations to supplement/confirm my decisions. Sometimes, I go counter to analyst research, e.g. with AMZN, YHOO, and some of those high flyers.
When QNTM (and every other company for that matter) meets with analysts at Comdex, individuals do not have the ability to find out what was said unless they buy tickets to Las Vegas and somehow get into that meeting. I could care less about how much analysts are getting paid to provide information. Analysts don't own QNTM. WE DO. So why do analysts have the infrastructure set up so information is streamlined to them rather than us? How much does it cost QNTM to have a document which gets published on the website at the same time they meet with analysts? Then QNTM can hand-hold the analysts and explain different parts of the presentation, but the general content should be available to every shareholder.
The reason for the current infrastructure seems to be this idea that the information needs to be filtered before going to the masses. This is a stupid reason. This needs to change. And I think there needs to be new legislature addressing the infrastructure, perhaps requiring free and timely posting of all public information like certain SEC documents through EDGAR.
-Bill |
