I have noticed that Yahoo message boards have not been started for many of the newer issues. Im beginning to think that Yahoo has started to quietly withdraw from the message board game. I have always wondered if these message boards have any effect today. By reading these message boards, you find that there is many a person who seem to have a career on the Yahoo message boards. When a negative (or positive) post is placed up on there, instantly you will get a response back of some type to challenge your position. These people seem to believe that the stock is influenced by unkind posts. My opinion is that its a good idea for Yahoo to distance themselves from the message board model. How can Yahoo believe that these message boards help their image? You log in to find lots of profane remarks and two-bit stock hacks pumping (or distorting) a stock.
Perhaps the Stock boards are just part of a wider revamp The message board link from news items are now gone: o Yahoo! News readers: Yahoo! News is working on new ways for readers to comment on the news and participate in a discussion around it. While we work on our new community features, the message boards that were linked from individual news articles have been taken offline. As they were set up, the Yahoo! News message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion. In addition, related discussions from similar news articles were not easily linked. Over the next few months, we plan to offer new discussion forums based on topics in the news and incorporating the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers. Neil Budde General Manager Yahoo! News
Yahoo should have pulled the plug on their boards years ago. 99% of the posts are garbage and Yahoo has to pay for it. The CSCO board is really something.
I've found the Yahoo message boards to be extremely helpful over the years. The very heavily traded (daytraded) stocks do attract their share of fools and pretenders. But other stocks often attract nice insights as to why stock is behaving in an unusual pattern. There have been many instances where a single post has set me off on further research, only to uncover issues that I wouldn't have been aware of otherwise. The only alternative to public message boards is a subscription group. But I've been there and done that, and the big drawback is that the number of participants is too limited to be valuable.
Back in the 80s-90s, there were these "boiler rooms" where guys cold called people and attempted to sell them junk stock. It was very similiar to that movie "Boiler Room" except in real life the victims were usually some elderly folk. The Yahoo message boards serve as a new form of the old boiler room. Imagine an elderly man trying to research a stock and he comes upon the yahoo message board where he sees all these pump messages. Not knowing any better he invests his retirement money into it. . . Now there are some informative posts on there occasionally, but for the most part its a zoo full of hacks and weirdos. Sometimes you come upon a person who seems to know what they are talking about, but are they actually trying to tell you the real story or are they trying to manipulate the stock in a fancier and classier way. There was one guy who presented well in the messages. He seemed classy and gained everyones confidence through technical charts. However, when you went through all of his messages you could clearly see how he was trying to manipulate the stock by gaining everyone's confidence. Nice try. It did seem like it was working though. Then there are those people who are there just to create noise. When I go to the AIG yahoo message board, all of a sudden I see all these posts about the Iraq war, George Bush and then racist statements. Somehow Google has gotten this right. I see many informative discussions on Google and never see all the noise. Now I only wish Yahoo would somehow get it right.