More Questions (Tin Foil Hat Special Feature by Warren)

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS JUST MY THINKING, NO ONE ELSES. I AM TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT IN MY HEAD TO CONNECT ALL THE DOTS WITHOUT GOING INSANE.

I woke up this morning to find a message on my post from 'hiptwist', who suggests that the doc366 sounds like a variety of 'astroturfing'. I looked it up. Looks good (thanks hiptwist). Musing on that all day long. Stuff not adding up so my brain so I do some more digging - I'm not satisfied with the depth to which I analysed it all (for those not initiated, we are discussing this thread about jpm/comex).

So I looked up the 'Read this story -->' pattern, because this is obviously done with software - the question I could not answer is 'what software is it?'. It looks like something someone has custom-built, but one of my research vectors was it might also be some kind of messenger-style add-in*, in which case, many people would be using it and (per my reasoning) the pattern should be identified elsewhere.

* .. which is still a possibility - anyone familiar with similar?

To my surprise, I did find the patterns I sought to find. I dug a bit deeper and identified (surprising) a handful of users who have lots of posts in the same [Abstract] + 'read this article -->' pattern. Here they are, with links so that you can confirm this pattern for yourself. For convenience I have also put the date that the user's first post appeared.

'truth_trader' 301 Messages (since 04-July-2008) [link]
(originally started posting as 'truth_trader53'

'doc366' 357 Messages (since 25-June-2009) [link]

'fxtrader00' 189 Messages (since 26-June-2009) [link]
NOTE: Not all his messages are the 'Read this article -->' type.

'cancelled_reservation' 314 Messages (since 29-June-2009) [link]

'casino_trade' 132 Messages (since 13-July-2009) [link]

NOW:, watch three of these guys have a 'discussion' together:

"END GAME FOR MORGAN'S SILVER SHORT" post by [truth_trader], with replies from [cancelled_reservation] and [fxtrader00].
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_J/threadview?m=tm&bn=10073&tid=384907&mid=384907&tof=-1&rt=2&frt=2&off=1

What conclusions to draw? Well. Sheesh. I'm sure you can come up with some. What links these user accounts is the same pattern of posts, and a all-too-coincidental occurence of them all giving replies to the same post. So basically, whoever controls all of these accounts has an agenda, but they have tried (failed) to make it look like background noise and regular users. There ARE a few other possibilities, but whoever comes up with a theory has to explain the correlation and patterns (i.e. primarily the question of whether these 5x users are centrally controlled or not, and secondarily: the motive behind their posts). [[ I'm sorry Louis and Harvey but I don't (personally) think that 'doc366' is legitimate, given the close links with these other users. ]]

Now for me, I'm all over the appearance of ideas and the way 'memes' regulate the flow of public opinion. To me, it's a modern thing where if you control the flow and quantity of various memes in circulation then you control the direction of public consciousness. Because of this, I'm incredibly suspicous of everyday things. For example my wife (who I've mentioned before) comes home and informs me that gold had a big spike up because of the Japan disaster - she had seen it on the news on the ferry coming home (this is the same gold price which is still trading sideways as we all know, and the same gold which typically gets no mention in the news when it reaches new all-time-historic highs every other week ... ?!!).

But lay it all out ... Silver is difficult to get (we know that - someone big has gone long physical and restricted supply). Comex is having issues (we can see that). Gold is undervalued (we know that), FIAT is fraudulent (we know this) - so the arrow points in the same direction as all this stuff ... the question for me, is WHY promote stories about the Comex default? and thus grease the wheel to its eventual demise? i.e. get the momementum rolling on something which is going to happen anyway. Or rather - PRIME PUBLIC OPINION about a specific set of events in order to direct the outcomes.

My own conclusion (dons Tin Foil Hat): Comex (a scapegoat) is about to default, and of course - someone, somewhere has known about it for a while and has prepared and directed things accordingly. It would seem that SGS is largely vindicated (content from Bears videos) and - get ready for Freegold, folks, this is going to be EPIC.

11 comments:

Warren James said...

p.s. I'm aware that the proximity (Yahoo Boards) to the wynter_benton myth, along with my general thesis above, is additional reason to doubt the wynter_benton story. However, that would be only CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE - I will be thinking deeper about this and let you know what my conclusions are - right after my SLV article.

Warren James said...

And an alternate explanation is that the 'read this story -->' pattern is some kind of special Yahoo software feature and that it's relatively common, and that those users happen to have similar interests. I'm going to still hunt for other explanations. I just thought it was all a bit too weird - i.e. who are these posters and what is their role on the Yahoo boards? For example, it may be a Yahoo-based team trying to drive traffic to their boards by posting relevant article links (Yahoo is losing the lead in a few areas). Anyone else got any input?

Robert LeRoy Parker said...

I dont know Warren. I think this stuff is just noise to be ignored.

Warren James said...

p.p.s. It's possible that the pattern is the yahoo equivalent of 'digg it' etc. I'll look into this. I could not find many occurences of the same thing, the pattern seemed to be restricted to the Yahoo Finance boards. The extract part is most commonly a direct cut+paste from the target article itself, BUT in some cases the text has been carefully selected (e.g. from the third paragraph).

But then why the targeting of the post to the affected stock? (i.e. the newslink thing). Does anyone know anything about the yahoo boards software which would explain (legitimize) this pattern?

Warren James said...

@Robert, yes. That's the problem with the internet in general is that there is too much noise to evaluate things correctly and that certain patterns are there if you look closely enough (confirmation bias? that's the word that appears to be bandied around lately).

If someone can come up for a valid reason for why these 5 x users are all posting the same pattern of content on the Yahoo boards and explain their agenda, I'll call of my dogs.

DarkMath said...

Good research into the astroturf thing. My take is the guy whose making money using astroturf software to post fake posts on Yahoo also has a hankering for Silver. So he says to himself after he gets bitten by the Silver Bug: hey my day job is spamming Yahoo message boards why don't I kill two birds with one stone and use the software to promote the Comex will default story.

The only thing I take from this whole story is Silver is growing in interest. "It takes a village" to grow an asset bubble if you will. We can expect this for the next 10 years until Silver looks like CSCO circa Feb 2000.

hiptwist said...

Thanks for the kudos.

I think, those pseudo-users are the equivalent of bot-nets via virus-infected PC's to e.g. implement denial-of-service attacks against dedicated hosts. These pseudo-users are used in social media. It's the next evolutionary step of a single pusher for a stock in a forum.

Currently they are still relatively easy to identify, as they rarely refer to previous posts. Such references are difficult to implement. These bots just push their opinion, sometimes with a link (="fact" as camouflage) to increase their credibility.

In this concrete case they propagate a COMEX-default.

Who would loose in such an incident? Those long in silver futures as the future would be settled in money and the silver spot price plays would play no more role.

Who would benefit from such an incident? The owners of physical silver, maybe other commodity exchanges and owners of silver shorts.

Rules for a CME-default: Read this story --> NYMEX Rule book 7B ;-)

paulbain said...

Warren,

I cannot understand your article at all. I just don't get it. Could you please clarify it a bit? Thanks.

Sincerely,
Paul D. Bain
paulbain@pobox.com

Warren James said...

Yes. New post doign the explaining: http://screwtapefiles.blogspot.com/2011/03/more-questions-explanation-on-my-post.html

Warren James said...

p.s. hiptwist, good feedback and clever. Your observations lead down to some scary territory - namely the day when we won't be able to tell the difference between humans and bots which are specifically created to propogate and perpetuate memes ('Memetic warfare'?). That is certainly a natural evolution and it makes me wonder how far we are down that path already - specifically in relation to stock pump-and-dump machinations.

Thank you for the link re: CME default, that seems pretty clear cut to me. I wonder how this all ends.

Warren James said...

[[ Update, for the benefit of anyone coming across this via search engine. It would appear that all five accounts named in my article have falled silent - the last posts were in the 'doc366' discussion. I won't read anything into this but the timing is interesting, especially considering the previous momentum that the accounts had with their 'Read this story' injections. I also see that others on the same thread had noticed my article. link. Nice. ]]