Hi Rande,
Nothing like a little review to keep it all in perspective, thanks for the links.
Here a interesting opinion I came across this morning while enjoying my newspaper and coffee,
Online trading threatens to create Wild West markets
Paul Kedrosky
National Post
Back in December, a San Diego-based outfit called 1st Net Technologies set up shop in two Internet chat groups and began touting itself as a great Internet investment. Its market-sharp executives regularly posted shameless, self-promoting notices, saying enticing (and cynical) things about their new company's love of the Internet. As an over-the-counter bulletin-board stock, 1st Net's claims were almost impossible to vet, thus making it easy for these sharpies to dangle a lure before "gullible" online investors.
But investors didn't go for the hook. Because rather than being caught by these promoters, online investors went after 1st Net instead. It was an ugly, anarchic, and stop-start campaign, but scores of online chat denizens gleefully took the company's claims apart in public. They unearthed the president's past problems with the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), as well as the company's Byzantine network of relationships with various shell companies. Online investors even "outed" the company's investor relations director. He had been posting guileless promotional stuff under another name. Whoops.
While it is a great story, it also shows how far off the mark is most of the hand-wringing about online trading. Stories about investors getting bilked online get all the press, but the truth is that technology is turning online investors into a potent force -- one that is more of a threat to markets and regulators than they are to it.
continued...
nationalpost.com |
