Who cares if so and so is a good and honest person.
All I want to know is can that person post some information that will be useful to me in trading the markets.
And I will not be waitng for sycophants or critics to tell me but rather evaluate the quality and usefulness of the posts by my own critera.
Some of that criteria will come from my educational background and experience and some from subjective things such as gut feeling.
Personally I'm not the slightest bit interested in posts on banks ( and most blue chips.) The only time I might read them is to give Hell or Mickey Mouse a bit of cheek.
My interest is in the penny dreds. It gets the adrenalin flowing nicely when your sitting on half a million of these and the price moves up.(more so in fact when it goes the other way.)
So my main interest in Hotcopper is the specky posters, whose picks are subjected to my careful inspection to either reject them or put them on my watch list.
( I used to enjoy the crazy nonsense that surrounded the religious and political debates but since those sections have been bowderalised I have joined the ABC "Your say Forum". Does wonders for reducing your agro.)
I'm really making the point that some of the posting on HC would bore me stiff if I read it, simply because I have no real interest (technical or recreational) in the areas of discussion.
Now that is fine with me. I still find HC suits my trading and investing patterns and I think it is ,for my purposes, the best around.
The "good" posters idea also is a fairly subjective concept. (One man's meet is another's poison.) My preference is for readable well expressed contributions. (Never was much good at decoding.)
One thing that has occurred to me is that analysts on,for example, Shares magazine go to press about once a week. Some of the posters here go to "press" many times a day. It's probably hard to maintain quality with that sort of output.
Which gets back to seeing the forum as not only a shares forum but also as fulfilling a social function for traders and investors. eg. Various get togethers advertised on this site.
