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Non-Tech : Auric Goldfinger's Short List -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (5800)	8/18/2000 10:12:58 AM
From: sommovigo	Respond to of 19428

Infostream.com, Who pays me? Well, my consulting company receives royalties on inventions and products that I developed in the audio field, and at this time that is my only source of income. As such, in particular, Sommovigo Design Consultants, Inc. pays me, as the sole employee and officer. I am developing additional products for that market and I hope to continue in that vein for many years to come. Now, since I have been so candid - perhaps you would like to share the intimate details of your income sources? A level playing field is not a joke, it is something that every retail investor deserves, and something which the SEC, the NASD, and the advent of the ECNs have been trying to serve. In a word, "fair" markets. The recent "Full Disclosure" ruling is a case in point about fair markets, and a ruling that, at least in spirit, I applaud.One method of achieving 'fair' markets is to curtail and eliminate any possible criminal activity... all of it. Bashers, touts, price manipulators of all manner and ilk, shell companies designed to only take money from investors, boiler rooms, you name it - I'd love to see it all go away in a flurry of handcuffs and fines. I recognize that many of the poeple here have exposed scams and, as such, have saved the retail investor that WOULD have otherwise invested in these scams from potential losses. I also recognize that there are people here who seem to be breaking the law and, since this has not been called attention to, I have directed attention to it. One cannot expect to flutter about town like Superman calling foul against companies, and be "challenging" the law yourself, and expect not to be called out for it. I think that many of the shorts-sellers on these boards do not respect the average, retail investor. There seems to be that kind of contempt amongst many of the short-seller posts I have read since January in this and other threads. Yet we probably provide the majority of the liquidity in the markets and, as unprofessional and largely novice investors, it is we that require the most protection. Protection from scams, protection from touts, protection from bashers, protection from price manipulators (momo and short-attack) and protection from professional brokers masquerading as private retail investors... especially those who tout or bash stocks while not disclosing their positions and possible conflicts of interest before communicating with the public via the mails or any provision of electronic media. I cannot applaud an uneven attack on criminality in the markets - by removing only one type of criminal, you merely make it more profitable for all of the other kinds of criminals. Exposing a scam company is fine, but partaking in possible criminal activity while doing it isn't... it creates an imbalance in the ecosystem, favoring one predator over another. More profit for fewer criminals, but it doesn't eliminate the losses that retail investors suffer - it merely moves them to different pockets of ill gotten profits. I suspect that the SEC feels the same way that I do, and I know that average retail investors feel the same way that I do. I will share this with you, slightly off-topic: One lesson that I have learned over these past months is that the actual company and its stock are not necessarily equivalent. Perception of a company in the market, almost entirely without regard for it's actual value, drives the market for its stock. This is the only reason why bashers and hypers can ply their trade successfully. Once the retail investor became empowered with the responsibility for their own investment accounts, and once the advent of message boards and instant electronic media communication became the status-quo for many of these investors, the ability for criminals to victimize retail investors increased by an order of magnitude. Manipulation of a stock moved to the aether-world of manipulating investor sentiment, and that is probably the most difficult of gray-areas for the SEC and other agencies to police... and why so many hypers and bashers, even professional brokers, continue unabated. Chris