The Ramblings of the Basher Underground
Saturday, April 7, 2001
by http://www.marketreporter.com/
Welcome to the world of stock threads via the Internet. It's a fast paced kiosk of information where hundreds and sometimes thousands gather to learn, teach, and of course bash a certain stock. More specifically OTCBB stocks. Also known as penny stocks. Penny stocks are sometimes very speculative, and over cause skepticism from other people and even sometimes, it's own shareholders. That's where the basher comes in. The basher is a contradiction to his/her own self. Multiple aliases, short messages with no explanation, and constant postings are some of the tricks the great Basherdini has under his/her sleeve to try and drive down a stock price.
Basher Case Study
Infotopia is a popular OTCBB stock with a bright future. They constantly announce record profit and revenue from sales of fitness products and other houseware items. Daniel Hoyng, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, stated April 6, 2001, ``We are very pleased with our record sales and profits for the first quarter of fiscal 2001. Despite a slowing economic environment, we continue to see sustained sales growth across our product lines Body by Jake, Bun & Thigh Rocker, Total Tiger, and Medicus Dual 2000 as we leverage our strategic alliances and powerful brand names. We are very pleased with the continued growth of our e-Commerce sales, which has proven to be a strong complement to our television infomercials.
Sales of our Total Tiger and Medicus Dual 2000 are just beginning and the Body by Jake; Bun & Thigh Rocker has not yet peaked with retail launch scheduled for later this fiscal year. Infotopia, Inc. has demonstrated our ability to launch new products through our successful strategic alliances and has many additional products to launch for the balance of fiscal 2001. We are very excited about our growth opportunities in 2001 and beyond.``
Despite their amazing line of products currently selling like hot cakes, they had a group of bashers wanting revenge. How would they get? What would they do? Bomb their office or kill an important company officer? Not hardly. There is one great place they can go to let out their anger.
Raging Bull.
The popular online website equipped with a message board for nearly every stock. Once particular company named Infotopia (OTCBB:IFTP) had quite a popular name on the OTCBB market, and thus a very active community of investors and potential investors firing back and forth information, opinions, and ideas on the future of it's company. The board is not sponsored by Infotopia, but company representatives have been known for interacting on the thread (short name for "message board") with shareholders. For reasons concerning the company's stock price, a certain group of investors lost confidence in the company sold their shares at a loss. Frustrated and angry with the company, they vowed revenge in their own sick and sadistic way. Instead of boycotting the company's products, or causing physical harm the company's offices or it's workers/officers, this group of people took their exasperation to the Raging Bull message board threads.
By using the same, once respected, names they used before to intelligently discuss IFTP, they posted ramblings on the boards filtered with lies trying to get others to sell IFTP stock in order to drive the price down. Their constant ramblings and ignorance drove many to sell, but they only made the die hard IFTP investor fight back. The group of former investors and now bashers would post short doomsday messages regarding IFTP trying to scare the newer posters from ever buying the stock. Their ways of deceit were pathetic and were posted with not justification.
Another group of bashers
Bashing the same stock on the same board, called them selves "investigators." They claimed that they were there to "inform" new investors about the dangers of IFTP (even though no real danger was in occurrence.) Once particular basher using the alias "janice456" would post ramblings on the message board predicting that IFTP's CEO would go to prison, even though the CEO of IFTP had never committed a crime. "janice456"'s posts would not make sense and would be short in length and very doomsday like in content. It is also suspected that she would post her garbage on a website called "Stock Patrol" ( http://www.stockpatrol.com/ ), then she would post on the message board arguing that "Stock Patrol" has written articles that agree with her (even though she was the one writing the articles and running the website.)
The alias " Janice456 " is believed to have belonged to "Janice Evans Shell", Viale Unbria #4*, 20*** Milan, Italy; and/or Janice Evans Shell , *42* Newby ***, Elk Grove, California 95**4.
She has been sued before by many companies including Business Wire for sending out false press releases about a non existent company.
What Can Be Done About It ?
Until the SEC catches the major bashers, there is one simple solution to the basher problem and that is to not listen to those who post negative ramblings about a stock on message boards. Constructive criticism is alright to consider taking seriously, but the basher who spends 16 hours (literally) posting jargon about a company is nothing but a mindless scam artist with no sense of intelligence.
I ask you fellow investor, please do YOUR OWN research and don't let the mindless drivel posted by bashers ever be a factor in whether or not your going to buy a certain stock. It's constant lying game with Ramblings from the Basher Underground.
( posted by JoeMoney in 2001 )
