How to Spot Fake Comments on Stock Boards

Disclaimer: This post does not constitute financial advice. Author has a long position in Gilead and Clover. Do your own due diligence before making an investment.

Fake comments aren’t just annoying. They’re bad for society. They discourage people from allocating their capital in an efficient manner. Fake comments steer people away from investing in cool stuff, and into garbage. Garbage stocks which are often a pump-and-dump.

This has serious ramifications. It means that instead of capital flowing to say, a state-of-the-art electric battery company, it goes instead to a pump-and-dump scam. The owner of the scam unloads his position onto unwary investors, and then uses the proceeds to buy a boat.

Instead of society getting some amazing new tech, some billionaire gets a second yacht.

This manipulation must stop. Investors think they’ve found a great stock, only to see it drop day after day. They lose their life savings. They get depressed. Months later when they see the stock has recovered, some even commit suicide.

Modern-day Wall Street is horrible. It will one day be regarded by historians as a grotesque abomination that caused insurmountable damage and suffering. The people that work for these firms and are involved in the manipulation of investments, are psychopaths.

Most investors who have an account on a stock message board will block or mute the people that post fake comments. But that’s not good enough. We have to put a stop to it.

Hardcore investors that have done their research won’t be swayed by junky bearish comments. Wall Street’s target is the newcomer. Someone who just happens upon a stock because it’s trending. They find a new stock, see a bunch of scary comments talking about bankruptcy (rare), lawsuits (cash-grabs), or how dumb the CEO is (can’t be that dumb to be a CEO), and decide the stock isn’t worth their time.

That’s Wall Street’s goal. To get as many people as possible to look somewhere else. To bugger off and just buy index funds. This leaves more gems for Wall Street once they decide to start accumulating.

So, to that end, here are some ways to spot a fake comment. Comments like these might be posted by frustrated investors, but there’s a way to tell those apart from paid trolls. (See #5 and #6.)

1. It’s a basic comment.

Basic comments are quick to post and effective. Someone can sway sentiment just as easily as with a simple comment as they can with extensive research.

It’s like when you ask your friend what he thinks of a restaurant, and he says, “It sucks.” This drops the chance you eating there. Your friend doesn’t need to launch into an extensive explanation of why it sucks, it just sucks. Your brain can fill in the holes by itself. (Bad food, bad service, bad smells, ugly décor, etc.)

Comments like this are simple and effective at driving away new investors.

Imagine there’s a post above this with some solid research. You read it, and think, “Wow, this company might actually be good.” Then you see five new comments have been posted. All of those comments are talking about how bad the company is. They’re loaded with poop emojis. They make you feel bad about investing or owning this stock.

Your Brain: “Hey, we can feel good again by selling this stock and going for a walk. On this walk I’ll convince you how smart you were to cut your losses. Later we’ll eat junk food.”

You six months later: “I can’t believe I sold that.”

Positive sentiment is easily smothered by negative comments, even if the comments are basic and fake.

 2. The comment uses the anchoring principle to create fear.

I’ve covered this before, but we’ll go over it again because it’s one of their major tools Wall Street manipulators use to scare ordinary investors.

Anchoring works like this. Say your stock is at $50. It’s bouncing up and down between $45 and $55. You think it’s being manipulated. There’s an important milestone coming up, like an earnings release. Wall Street doesn’t want you to hold through earnings, because they already know it’s going to be great.

So they have their bots/paid trolls post comments like, “Going to $30 after earnings.”

Or, “I’m a buyer at $25.”

Seeing numbers like this causes your brain to start thinking that the stock might actually drop that low. Our brains become illogically attached to recent numbers.

Clothing stores are notorious for abusing this. (T.J. Maxx was even sued for it.) They’ll put a price on a shirt at $50, and right next to it it’ll say, comparable, or on sale, from $95.

Your brain is like, “Wow what a great deal. I’m saving $45!”

Wrong.

It’s just a $50 shirt. It was always $50. Actually, it’s worth probably closer to $10, given how large the margins are at brand-name clothing stores.

Now that you’ve read this, I know what you’re thinking. “I would never fall prey to this. I’m a smart gorilla.”

Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Everybody falls for this trick, unless you know how it works. (Sometimes even still.)

Here’s a test you can run on friends and family. For this test you’ll need two friends or family members.

Pick a historical figure they’re aware of, but not too familiar with.

Let’s say, Alexander the Great.

Ask the first friend, “Do you think Alexander the Great was younger or older than 85 when he died?”

Wait for their answer.

Then ask them, “How old do you think Alexander the Great was when he died?”

Numerous economic studies show that your friend will give an answer that’s relatively close to 85.

Now, ask the second friend the same set of questions, but change the number to 45.

Odds are they’ll say an age that’s lower than the first friend.

Both numbers were chosen randomly and have nothing to do when he died. But your brain is trying to solve the problem and latches on to the last bit of information it was presented with.

(Historians believe Alexander the Great died at 32. Did the photo of the old man make you think he died old? Because that’s similar to what a photo of a dumpster fire next to a stock ticker is trying to accomplish.)

When it comes to stocks, your brain is trying to solve the problem of whether or not to invest. It sees the current price at $50, but then is presented with information that it might drop to $30, or $25. The idea that the stock might crash is enough to scare away some new investors.

Which is Wall Street’s goal. They can’t scare away everybody. It’s just a numbers game to them. They know that by posting comments like this then volume will go down. Less volume means it’s easier to short the stock down to their target price. Once they’ve massacred the stock price, the call options they sold on the stock expire worthless, and Wall Street can start accumulating the stock for cheap.

3. The comment blames management, particularly the CEO for almost everything.

“Worst CEO in history.”

“Fire the CEO and everything gets better.”

“CEO raking in millions while we suffer.”

Stuff like that. You see it all the time. These types of posts are designed to sew fear about the company.

Your brain runs a quick calculation: “How can this be a good investment if the person in change of the company a moron?”

The conclusion your brain quickly arrives at is: “It can’t.”

The CEO attack angle is often found when your stock is always red.

If the paid bashers are posting how dumb the CEO is, and you pull up a one-year chart and see that the stock is flat, or always declining, then you’re more likely to agree with their hypothesis.

Wall Street thinks in terms of years. Their discounted cash flow models are calculating profits that might not occur for a decade. Whereas you’re checking your stocks every few hours to see if anything has changed.

You’re expecting it to act like a motorboat (able to pivot at a moment’s notice) but the stock is behaving like a cruise ship beached in Mongolia.

Companies that rake in billions in revenue take a while to turn around. A CEO doesn’t have a magic wand. They implement new policies and deploy resources in a way that will benefit the long-term holders of the company.

What these bears are trying to get you to agree with is: “This CEO wants to be warm, so they’re dumb for not setting their living room on fire.”

Yes, in the short term that would work, but in the long term it’s a disaster.

It takes a long time for a CEO to be proven an idiot. If they haven’t been in the job for at least five years, then cut them some slack.

Tesla treaded water for a decade before going parabolic. During that time lots of people said Elon Musk was an idiot and should be replaced.

4. It’s a tiny comment and a dumb gif/photo.

You see this on Stocktwits and Yahoo Finance a lot. People will post a basic comment like, “This stock is garbage,” and they’ll attach an animated photo of a burning garbage dumpster. The implication being that this stock is a dumpster fire.

Our brains are easily swayed by this stuff, especially if the stock is inexplicably red. Panic leads to more panic. You keep scrolling down. You see another comment. “This stock is poop.” Attached to it is the famous scene from Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm finds a giant pile of triceratops droppings.

When an image or animated photo is attached to a comment, it takes up more space on the website. Roughly three times the space of a regular Stocktwits comment.

This means three positive comments can be drowned out by one negative comment with a dumb photo.

5. The user who posted the comment posts a lot.

This is an easy way to tell the difference between frustrated investors, and someone who is manipulating the stock.

Frustrated investors don’t post a lot. They’ll make a comment like, “Wow, I can’t believe this.”

Or, “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

They express mostly frustration instead of negativity. Their comment is a believable and human reaction to a sudden disaster.

Paid basher are the opposite. They post a lot, and it’s all negative.

How often do you personally post on a stock message board? Once a day? Once a week? Never?

Paid bashers are sometimes posting 10, 20, 30 times a day. Or more. Usually on a single stock, but sometimes across multiple tickers. Their posts are frequent and basic.

The more someone posts, the more likely they are to be trying to influence sentiment.

If you click someone’s Stocktwit’s profile and see they’ve posted thousands of bearish stock ideas…they’re likely a manipulator.

6. Posts mostly only appear during market hours, and stick to a small number of talking points.

There are two types of users a fake comment can come from: A bot, and a paid basher.

Both will usually only post during market hours (4am EST to 8pm EST).

Bots usually post in conjunction with a short attack. So when the stock is red, the bots come out. They do this so that if the firm shorting/manipulating the stock is ever investigated by the SEC (lol) they can point to the bearish posts and say, “See, look, there was negative sentiment, that’s why we shorted the stock to death.”

The firms that run the bot programs are smart. They can’t run the bot 24/7. It would become instantly obvious that the comments are coming from a bot if they were posted every 10 minutes non-stop. Since their goal is to influence you into buying or selling (which you can only do at certain times) they focus on market hours.

Click the person’s profile. See when they post. They’ve probably never dropped an insightful comment at 10AM on a Sunday.

Paid bashers are a bit different. This is a person working in what is likely a third-world country with cheap labor. They have offices set up in what’s called “troll factories.” But these people are also human. While the labor laws are less stringent in these countries, they aren’t working 150 hours a week. Paid bashers are too valuable to work to death. The value that comes from destroying a stock by 50% for no reason is worth billions in short-selling income, call option expiration, and rebound accumulation.

Paid bashers likely only work 40-50 hours per week. They also have slightly more complicated posts than the bots. Instead of “This stock is junk,” they’ve done some research, or more likely been given research on the company, and some bearish talking points. They’ll make references to management, upcoming milestones, or missed milestones in the past.

But these paid bashers are just modern-day telemarketers. Most of them are uneducated when it comes to investing. They can’t think for themselves. They can’t adapt to new information.

If you feel like a bearish user is sticking to a script, it’s probably because they are.

Most of the time if you challenge their bullshit, they won’t be able to defend it. They’ll resort to ad-hominem attacks. (Attacking you instead of your information.)

If you’re challenging a paid basher’s bullshit, and they respond with “You’re dumb,” instead of a detailed explanation of why they’re right and you’re wrong, then you can ignore this person.

Bots are unable to communicate normally.

You can out them by asking them simple questions that act like a captcha. Use a slightly complicated question, not basic math. Make sure to vary your questions. Obviously, nobody on the internet is under the obligation to respond to anyone, but if you see the same bear-bot every day, and they never answer anyone about anything… Then you can alert other investors that this user is a fraud. Don’t just mute them. Muting them doesn’t help your cause.

Bots and paid bashers must be exposed for the good of the economy. A properly functioning market is a beautiful thing. This market is riddled with cancerous tumors that must be purged.

7. The user you suspect of posting fake comments deletes their comments every day.

You see this on Yahoo Finance a lot. Paid bashers are constantly deleting their posts. If you click their profiles, you’ll see they might only have 30-50 reactions. They show up every day on the same tickers spewing the same garbage. If they get too many downvotes, they delete their comment. If people out them as being trolls, they delete their comment. After the market closes, they delete all their comments.

Sometimes they’ll change their username and photo. But if you’ve been following the stock for a while, then it’s obvious who they are. This is why it’s important to focus on only a few stocks if you think there’s manipulation going on.

It’s impossible to keep an eye on 50 stocks and know if each one is being manipulated. But a single stock? That’s easy. All you have to do is watch the sentiment and the price action. If things start to feel unnatural, they probably are.

Especially if the news is good and the revenues are growing.

Watch the one-minute charts and compare them to the indexes. Is someone shorting every pop when the indexes jump? Are they letting your stock drop every time the index drops? It’s probably being manipulated.

8. Users you suspect of being frauds posted a lot of bearish comments on GME or AMC during the big squeeze.

It was late January in 2021. GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks were jumping huge every day. 50%, 80% 100%. Monster numbers.

The stock message boards were instantly flooded. Thousands of bearish posts telling you the price collapse was imminent. In the end they were right, but they were wrong for several days as GameStop ran from $40 to $400.

Most stocks are being manipulated in one way or another. But when stocks are manipulated downwards it’s even more obvious. This is because most people do not short stocks. They buy them. They go long. They invest in cool companies and hope to see them grow. It takes a special type of person to bet on the destruction of a company.

It’s unknown what percentage of investors short stocks, but it’s probably low. Lower than 1%, I imagine. Maybe extremely low.

Ask your friends. How many investors do you know who primarily focus on shorting? I bet it’s close to zero.

So then what accounts for half the posts on GameStop coming from bearish users?

If 1 in 100 people short stocks, but 50 out of a 100 users are posting bearish comments…then your stock is either incredibly terrible (unlikely) or it’s being manipulated by shorts (more likely.)

While researching manipulated companies I discovered that a lot of bearish commenters were involved in both GameStop and AMC. You can scroll back through their comment histories on Stocktwits. These were users that were occasionally bearish on a few stocks, but then went absolutely batshit on the negativity with GME and AMC.

What I think probably happened is this: Short funds were caught with their pants down. They were losing billions. They had to stop the bleeding, so they re-allocated resources (bots and paid bashers) to concentrating on GameStop and AMC. Most of these accounts had never mentioned GameStop or AMC before.

Which is pretty close to a smoking gun, in my opinion.

In the future, if there’s another short squeeze, and all of the sudden the bears come out of the woodwork, it’s safe to assume that a lot of these bears are bots or paid bashers.

This doesn’t just apply to GME or AMC. If the accounts you’re examining posted bearish sentiment about any squeezed stock in the past, they might be bots. Especially if the comments are basic.

9. The comments come from a new account.

This can only be checked on certain message boards. Stocktwits will display the date a user joined the board. Yahoo Finance does not.

Comments by new users should be treated with extreme prejudice, both bullish and bearish.

Bots and paid bashers are constantly making new accounts for two reasons. One: The boards ban them for their manipulative behavior. Two: Over a long enough time period, it’s impossible to hide that they’re a paid manipulator.

It just gets too obvious.

If people see that someone is constantly saying good companies are bad, then they’re either an idiot, or being paid to trash talk these stocks. Either way, they can be safely ignored.

Wrapping up.

I don’t think Stocktwits is involved in stock manipulation. If they were, they would hide the date created on the user’s profile, and they would also give users the ability to delete comments.

Yahoo Finance on the other hand…doesn’t show a user’s account creation date, allows users to delete posts, and will auto-delete a comment that links GripRoom’s stock manipulation articles.

Yet, they allow comments like this to be posted.

Notice how it received 22 upvotes after only a minute. Extremely unnatural. Try posting a comment on any message board on Yahoo Finance. I guarantee you that even if it’s hottest stock out there, and your comment is amazing, it won’t get 22 upvotes in less than a minute, if ever.

Yahoo Finance, or more likely the administrators/programmers that run the finance message boards, are possibly involved in the manipulation of stocks. There are just too many coincidences. Too many obvious loopholes they refuse to close.

Yahoo Finance is either complicit, or lazy in this regard. Either way they should be dragged in front of regulators and forced to explain themselves.

Yahoo Finance should immediately:

1. Stop allowing users to change their username.

2. Stop allowing users to delete their comments.

3. Stop letting bots manipulate upvotes and downvotes.

It’s a crazy world out there. Don’t let Wall Street steal your gems.

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