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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (7918)	4/12/2005 4:39:09 PM
From: olivier asser	Respond to of 12465

We've covered this ground before, ad nauseum, but let's do it again, shall we: Like investment banks who issue recs in their names and change analysts all the time, TP had proprietary names for analysts: Merlin, Skibum, Excalibur and C2. Day Traders Online had one analyst, DT. Like DTO, TP had several analysts under the Skibum nick, as DTO did under DT. I let that be known to Gretchen Morgenson after she published that article, for which I was the reason it was published, I went to Times Square and met with her personally, and then she publishes that, completely misleading passage, without even asking me for comment in advance. The fact is, I agreed to work at TP based on an oral agreement on 3/16/00, only later did Rea send me a contract and that I did provide Gretchen. Then she writes that, no doubt to turn what are serious violations into a circus that might sell newspapers. Now, let's take issue with the logic here. The only reason , Rea required TP analysts to work as Skibum (as also Ray Johns of DTO required DT for all analysts) was this: he didn't want anyone to know who gave the recommendations, because if they were good ones then that analyst could easily have started a new site and brought members to the new site, hurting Rea's business. Unfortunately for him, as soon as it became clear that there were serious questions about the integrity of TP's operations, I PTP'ed dozens of TP members privately, told them my name and that I was leaving shortly. They said they realized it was like at DT, because all of a sudden on 3/17/00 the Skibum recs started to make them money - I issued maybe 1-3 a day, maximum, while Rea and C2 were issuing hundreds, as I later learned in return for the commission kickbacks. Now I wouldn't believe everything you read in the New York Times as fact. I once thought I could generally trust their reporting, but after my experience with Gretchen, I realized that in any story there would be risks that the truth was quite different - and the scandal at NYT about sources and made-up stories by several reporters bore that out, still great stories and many of them, but there are some you need to question (how to do that though without all the facts is a good question). On balance though, I owe Gretchen a debt of gratitude for doing the story at all, which I later realized was a major step in the right direction, imperfect and incomplete as it was, and I respect many of the stories she has done since. She merely underestimated the damage done, and turned it into a circus, at which I was very disappointed at the time. On the other hand, she located Rea and Bentley's offshore accounts.