Vmoto and Social Media

Hi All

I thought the social media 'thing' is worth pursuing on its own thread.

Obviously some mixed views about it and/or its use by Vmoto.

I am a (relatively) recent convert. It stemmed from a conversation with a 'youth' with whom I was arguing/discussing about the virtue of social media. And the conversation turned to investing and he KO'd me by reminding of a story about an even older dude..........Buffett (I know I know but bear with me).

The salad oil fraud that nearly brought down American Express (it had unlimited liability at that stage). Buffett believed it would not kill off AMEX and actually spent time in restaurants watching the behaviour of customers and concluded the crisis would pass and so he continued to invest (even more) in AMEX. Then I get reminded of the stories about him sitting counting loaded train carriages coming from manufacturers.

In any case, my youthful adversary then tells me if Buffet and his ilk had access to today's social media then he could have done his 'research' from the comfort of his own home and it would have been more thorough.

Kid 1. Old fart 0.

Let's bring it back to Vmoto.

Our old mate @sentabool kept telling us stories about a mob called Super Soco months before it became official.

The Ducati story was the worst kept secret going before it was officially announced too. The SP spiked significantly once the deal was announced on the ASX.

The point being, that the information was there if people wanted to take notice of it and invest.

But what about VMoto's responsibility to make the announcements rather than 'post'? Grey area I think. But they would (I think correctly) argue that as contracts had not been signed, they couldn't announce it. "Courting" isn't announcement 'worthy' and in some case would alert competitors.

If I could swing back to what @MTV (?) said about preferring the company to not warn competitors. I get that. A problem with the ubiquitous social media though is that your courting partners or supply channel partners may want to spruik activities and so directly or indirectly Vmoto get 'named' and/or implied so why not frame the narrative to suit yourself via your own social media posts?

I also realise that there is another aspect to this, and that is, could the company make more announcements (say like the recent Vortex / Fortex model issue). Maybe. But I figure it is a grey area and you could argue for the status quo as equally well for announcements about 'everything'.

If I could zoom out now to the broader market.

I view the market as being in 2 distinct groups. Price Takers (for example HGO - as many here have mentioned that) versus Price / Market makers (that's where I slot VMT).

Social Media activity and monitoring can be very very useful for investors but not so much in the say that Price Taker segment of the market.

Well at least, that's my view.

Of course, there are those amongst us who are not interested in fundamentals. Chartists just monitor the graphs. Nothing wrong with that. But for those of us who do want to 'understand' your investment, I think Social Media is a great tool and obviously some like @lazysuzanne dabble in it very skilfully.

Linked to Social Media, I suppose, is the outright 'Search' stuff and I get the impression that some here like @Inchiquin and @kleuskenn 'eat' Google Analytics stuff. I haven't started on that in a concerted way but will get there (but I believe all search is 'linked' one way or another).

Where am I going with all of this?

I am interested in people's views about the utility of Social Media as a research tool.

From a personal perspective, I think a lot of my posts are skewed towards it and some like @veeone liken my posts and activity to that of a troll. Fair enough. No offence taken. But just for the record, I am building search tools/engines with an associate and the aim is to (pretty much) completely automate investment research via 4 methods including Social media. So a lot of what I post is the result of 'flags' received. I don't spend my day 'trolling' social media pages.

Finally, if people are interested to share, I would like people's views on Social media as a research tool and whether they think the information you get from it useful. Perhaps you are not sure about using it.

Conversely, if you think it is of little use, could you share your thoughts on what research methods you prefer.

Cheers