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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PAL who wrote (108022)	9/6/2000 9:22:53 PM
From: Gary M. Reed	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 164684

PAL, I lost all remaining respect for Motley Fool as a credible source a long time ago. A few months ago I was named as a co-defendant in a $1 million defamation suit filed by CS First Boston, claiming I had defamed one of their analysts on a Yahoo message board (I referred to the analyst as "an idiot" after he reiterated his "hold" rating 16 times in a 5 month period on a stock that went from $30 to $58 in that same time frame). The day after the suit was filed, Bloomberg and Dow Jones picked up well-researched coverage of the story. The day after that, a Motley Fool columnist provided his own "spin" on the story...basically saying that First Boston was justified in bringing the lawsuit and that this columnist thought the suit was a great idea, because OBVIOUSLY CSFB was suing a bunch of foul-mouthed cretins. In short, an attention-getter article. After I read the article, I emailed the Motley Fool columnist questioning some of his defamatory statements and assertions. He responded by saying that: 1.) Even though he (the columnist) was an attorney by training, he had yet to see the actual lawsuit documents (his "facts" came directly from the Bloomberg and Dow Jones stories--he freely admitted he had not done one iota of research); 2.) He had not even bothered to review the actual Yahoo board postings that were the basis of the lawsuit. In fact, he inferred that he wasn't even interested in seeing the postings that were the center of the lawsuit...ergo, he just wanted to throw an article together that would draw hits to his MF site. The more controversial, the better, and to hell with investigating the facts. What a joke. So in a nutshell, this paid Motley Fool columnist put a highly-opinionated column together simply by perusing a Dow Jones news story, without doing one iota of research or fact-checking. When I asked him to check the facts, and offered to provide the links and sources of the info, he wasn't interested. I went on to tell them that my "offense" against CSFB was that I referred to their analyst as "an idiot." He responded by saying, "well, it sounds like you may have a good defense in the lawsuit," not "geez, I guess I should've looked at the posts before I called you a foul-mouthed cretin..." "I didn't do any research on your story, nor will I, yet I'm going to write an article saying you are a scumbag who deserved to be sued, and I hope CS First Boston wins." The thing that pissed me off the most was, this goofball's story was picked up on Yahoo Finance under ELN, a stock my mother owns. Needless to say, my mom--a rancher in Iowa--reads this clown's story basically saying I deserved to lose this suit and freaked out. "Well it's in print Gary, people don't write articles unless they're true..." "Well Mom, in this case, we're talking about Motley Fool, and they DON'T bother checking to see if their columns have any basis of truth..." If I weren't so busy kicking First Boston's ass, I'd sue Motley Fool for defamation. So why in the world would ANYONE put one iota of credence into their stock picks? One of their columnists personally acknowledged to me that he doesn't do any research for any of his articles, nor is he interested in setting the truth straight with a retraction, so why would I think anything were different with their stock picks? They refuse to research their stories, so I am compelled to believe they are equally loathe to research their alleged stock picks. If they were a publicly-held co., I would short them as well as AMZN. Not to mention the fact that the words "Fool" and "long Amazon" go together fittingly. They were meant for each other.