From Dumb Money, by Joey Anuff and Gary Wolf, published in 2000:
Why have so few, in the history of our moralistic society, spoken out against the exploitation of idiots? Someday, a great gathering of the unintelligent will take place and by their sheer numbers and the intensity of their resentment will sweep away the institutions of finance like so much dust on the glossy cover of an annual report.
Every so often, during my E*Trade days, I would receive an annual report in the mail. I never opened a single one. I preferred to get my information from the great central plazas of the feeble-minded, also known as the online message boards of Yahoo.
It didn’t used to be so easy to find a hundred thousand suckers. Before the internet you had to tout your low float stocks via carefully nurtured lists of newsletter subscribers, or pay the rent on a fifth-floor walk-up full of ragged salesmen on telephones, cold-calling their way into a mile-deep hole of karmic debt.
I pretend to know better now but I still find the online message boards fascinating.
The finance boards on Yahoo are the most active community site anywhere on the web and make up more than 60% of Yahoo’s total traffic. Or so someone told me. Rather than go to the trouble of looking at the statistics, I prefer to make this more or less logical but probably incorrect assertion and challenge you to prove me wrong. After all that’s how things are done on the Yahoo message boards.
No subject is more perfectly suited to all-day second-hand gossip than the stock market with its cast of thousands of listed companies whose fortunes rise and fall in response to political, economic, and cultural news; the peccadilloes of executives; of partnerships made and broken; the weather.
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