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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (86749)	5/15/2004 11:26:55 AM
From: rrufff	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 122087

As I've posted, I'd hoped that message boards would have been the great equalizer in providing for organizational mechanisms for shareholders to protect against management schemes or excesses. There are enough shareholder - accountants, attorneys, business people - who could provide a network of advice and planning. At some point, I had also thought about pursuing a semi pro-bono career in my real life to bring some real advocacy to the shareholder area. The class action process is absurd. No further discussion needed. The only way to get anywhere in court so that shareholders have real results is to find attorneys who are willing to get away from the boilerplate and easy money of class action crap. The key in class actions is to get as many hours to reach the maximum payment/hours spent (or pretended to be spent) ratio. Does anyone seriously think that class action attorneys really care about shareholders? This is a direct result of the history of class action. No doubt some of the original class actions in the dangerous and defective products area were somewhat altruistic and influenced by people such as Ralph Nader. However, as attorneys' fees became more predictable and patterns of maximizing fees with boilerplate and discovery, it has "evolved" into what we have today. BTW - I got some kind of check from Fedex recently for .95 that must have been some class action bonanza. I'm sure there were a few million in fees. I don't use fedex a lot but I can only imagine the redtape and fees behind getting me that check for .95. OTOH - there are small numbers of attorneys who would like to change the playing field. Attack personal corporate defendants, promoters, scamsters, attack the trail of assets, attack insurance policies and have payments made so as not to destroy the company, lobby, organize, etc. This takes effort and is not the lucrative "cookie cutter" approach used in 99% of litigation today. Lawyers don't like the tough cases or to abandon "cookie cutter" and "boilerplate" because this take lots of work and the payments are not predicatable and small firms can go broke once they get stuck in the paperwork blizzard. A Class Action, the movie with John Travolta, is fairly realistic. Unfortunately, getting the message and organizing is next to impossible for those that still want to change the system. Message boards have failed because they are overwhelmed with ego, that is a reflection of what is wrong in the real world. We all fall into this pattern, myself included, defending the attack, attacking, stroking our own egos, showing how others are not as "superior." There has been some great detective work by posters in outing scams, many on this thread alone. IMO, the ego trips have failed to provide the next step for the society of retail investors. We have even seen posters on this thread arguing recently about who is a better scam buster. It wouldn't take much to get shareholders organized. However, egos would have to be secondary to real results. One site I followed a couple of years ago was eraider.com. It had an interesting formation and premise and I had hoped it would be one of the catalysts for promoting shareholder rights. It isn't just the outright scam, it's the lack of recognition that shareholders actually own the company and that BOD and management works for shareholders and has a fiduciary duty to maximize the value of the company. Instead, the maximization seems to be towards options and benefits packages for management and shareholders have accepted this as a given. I've been amazed at responses I get sometimes on message boards when I question management benefits, options or insider selling. Very few people seem to realize that there is any legal fiduciary duty to shareholders and the inherent conflict of interest is not something that should be swept under the rug. Your postings, as I said, were enlightening but also saddened me in the sense that perhaps we should forget about doing anything about fixing the system, whether it be the courts, administrative and regulatory processes or simply communication and organization. Maybe the only way is to find the scams and just short them and profit. Of course, even that road is not democratic. Had the great shorts worked harder to equalize the playing field in shorting, rather than keeping the game semi-closed to maximize their own profits (a bit ironic wouldn't you say?) we would today be seeing more retail shorts, both in support of processes that encourage shorting and in actual shorting for their own accounts. The growth of hedge funds is a testament that there is a thriving opportunity here. Yet, they have not done anything significant to equalize the process. Hedge funds and professionals will bitch and moan about the new naked short rules or the uptick rule, but they are fairly quiet about procedures that would allow retail into their world. This is a cynical attempt to pretend to be a hero, while largely doing things sometimes very similar to those that they attack. The whole MM and specialist systems should be revamped such that the technology that is available would eliminate these artificial monopolies. Allow the equivalent of INET for everything. Let you and me compete for the best auction price, an EBAY for equities. If it's not profitable to run, then have the government control and regulate it. The cost here would be trivial compared to what is NEEDED to really have an SEC with any teeth. SEC now has the manpower to only handle the egregious case that will bring headlines and even those are ignored because of a lack of resources and the enormous cost of litigation. This is just a first step idea, but, in my mind would go a long way towards elminating or limiting the games that are played, particularly on OTC BB. Forget pink sheets. I don't do much there and I can only imagine that the ratio of scam to value there approaches infinity. Enough of that rant - have a nice weekend.