Been amusing myself by reading the yahoo stock boards again. The prose stylings of the people who post there are pretty fascinating. While presumably these are mostly people who spend a significant amount of their time (and family's money) day trading, they quite often come across as being only marginally literate, both in terms of their ability to communicate and in terms of their understanding of The Exciting World of High Finance.
More than that, the rhetoric they invoke is very similar to that invoked by warblogger types at Redstate. Investing in the markets requires a great deal of courage and resolve - where courage usually involves holding on to tanking stocks as they tank - and words like "strategy," devoid of any actual meaning, are thrown around. People who know nothing position themselves as "experts" and snidely talk down to "beginners." And there are, of course, plenty of beginners, people who really shouldn't be day trading or God forbid have access to a margin account.
More than that there's this underlying belief that typing away on a Yahoo message board can really swing the stock price, as there's a constant pissing contest between "shorts" and "longs" in attempts to push the stock up or down.
Unlike most conservative warbloggers, at least the amateur stock touts actually have some skin in the game.
