So the writing world has gotten flatter but to the extent there are dishonest people infiltrating the world of stock market information, there of course have always been dishonest people in the world of stock market information. There is no getting rid of them, dishonesty is as old as humanity.
Internet chat rooms are no longer what they once were so maybe publishing articles at financial websites is the next step. Just as not all chat rooms participants are dishonest not all writers of articles are dishonest. In percentage terms it is probably very few. A reader’s odds of stumbling across a bad actor or two probably increases dramatically if they read a lot of articles about lottery ticket-biotech stocks written by anonymous authors.
It is appropriate that I disclose the nature of my relationships with Seeking Alpha and theStreet but am putting it here at the end as I suspect most people won’t care.
I was one of the first outside contributors to Seeking Alpha. My first article posted on December 4. 2004 and I believe it was one of the first 100 on their site (it looks like there were a lot of articles that were double published in the early days so first 100 is an estimate). I don’t recall ever getting paid once they started paying contributors so if I did get paid it would have been a very small amount like less than $100 and only one time. My experience with Seeking Alpha has always been positive.
I have been a paid contributor to theStreet.com since 2005. I was brought in as the ETF guy and have stuck with that for the most part. I might guess that out of almost 1000 articles, 900 of them were about ETFs. My experience with theStreet has been a little clunkier than with Seeking Alpha but theStreet paid me well over the years.
This article was written by AdvisorShares ETF Strategist Roger Nusbaum.