the best post ever written about hc ramping

This was a post recently written by our fellow poster Neil_WA regarding a particular stock, however I think it applies to Hotcopper in general.
It's a must-read for any newbie, or anyone who doubts that Hotcopper can affect the share price of small cap stocks.

Neil_WA's post is as follows, enjoy:

RE: "If anyone here thinks that HC can have influence on the SP of a stock - you are living in a dream world."

There is very good research evidence of the effect of forums in affecting share price/volume and this is why ASIC are taking a growing interest in them. The price movement in some stock can only be put down to forum activity.

When trying to spread rumours posting on a forum may spread this quickly to a large number of people across a broad spectrum of investors to which you can add word of mouth that multiply that several times.

Though there may not be many regular posters, there are many times more that browse the posts with many getting up into many hundreds or even thousands of reads. This is significant in a stock that may have 1000-5000 investors and a market cap less than $100m like PDY, though obviously not a big effect of a company that has a MC over $100b like BHP.

It is a common "defence" trotted out by "rampers" to justify there attempted manipulation of shareprice.

There are many ramping techniques employed. Most are very transparent and all but the most gullible see through them. This describes the majority of ramping.

Some are much more sophisticated requiring a coordinated approach from a group to appear to be a real inquisitive dialogue. My favourite is the "doubter" who "sees the light" after lots of persuasive posts by the rest of the team (usually at least 3-4 others to make this seem like a consensus), with the "doubter" then thanking the others for enlightening him/her as to how good this stock really is and then becoming its strongest advocate. This will suck in many more who get carried away.

There are other clever techniques employed as well. A good thing to look out for is recently added accounts posting on only one or a few stocks - though the same "team" may work more than one stock.

Fortunately the much firmer stance from HC over the last couple of years has cleaned this up a lot (See the amazing coordinated group of GPN (previous incarnation of PDY) a couple of years ago for one of the the most extreme examples). Some will inevitably slip through and some sail very close to the wind.