Bashers are intent on driving the price of stocks down. They do this by -

• lying about the legitimacy of the company or its news releases
• rehashing old negative news about the company
• insulting shareholders for holding their stock when prices fall
• attempting to discredit other board posters with claims that they cannot provide proof for
• announcing "great new stocks getting ready to explode" in hopes of distracting investors from the stock at hand
• attempting to instill a sense of urgency for the reader to take action immediately by typing in ALL CAPS
• providing information that they claim to be factual without also providing source links to back up their claims

Some bashers work alone. Most work in teams with other bashers. Some are independents. Others are paid employees or contractors of a market maker or some other person or entity.

I'm not going to go into the details of why a person bashes a stock, except to say that their ultimate objective is to drive down the price so that they or their employers can purchase huge lots at extremely low prices. Some say that bashers manipulate the stock prices. In truth, bashers manipulate the investors.

If you should be fortunate enough to invest in a stock under attack by bashers, you are in for a rough ride. Bashers rarely, if ever, bash a bad stock. They do, however, bash stocks that have great potential and which are rapidly becoming popular amongst investors.

What you do with your investments is entirely up to you. You can heed the advice of a stranger bent upon getting his hands on your shares, or you could lend yourself to the fruits of your own "due diligence" research.

When you happen across a post on a discussion forum which reeks of bashing, take just a moment to ask yourself three simple questions. Note that you will have to ask these questions of yourself because asking them of the basher will result only in the most nonsensical answers that man could ever devise.

1. Are you seriously going to trust your investments to the rants of someone you don't even know?
2. Why is this person so darned intent on me selling my stock? What's in it for him?
3. If this is such a bad stock, why is this guy even here? With the speed at which the market moves, wouldn't it be wiser if this person were to just leave and go work a stock that he believes in?

In stock investing, time literally is money. Every second that a basher stays on a stock's forum trying to convince investors to dump their shares, he's wasting precious time and hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of investment opportunity. And so, it only goes to reason that if a particular stock is really worthless then the discussion forums would become silent as investors dump and flee instead of becoming discussion hot-spots.

A special note - if you should happen upon a stock's discussion forum where there aren't many posts for that day, read back through the posts of the past week, or so. If you discover that the stock was recently under basher attack, the silence that the forum is now experiencing may be the result of a successful bashing attack resulting in an exodus of the weaker investors.

Tags: Bashers Manipulators Market Makers

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