Blog - Investing Notes

March 30, 2006 - Who Reads Yahoo! Message Boards?

We get a varying flow of traffic from Yahoo! message boards, usually from boards of "Cramerized" stocks to either our review of Jim Cramer's market timing record or our evaluation of his stock picking ability. Who reads these stock boards? Using a sample of 212 unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for readers recently visiting from five different Yahoo! message boards, we find that:

• 77% arrive via geographically dispersed Internet Service Providers (ISPs, such as America Online, Comcast, Cox, Road Runner, SBC, Verizon...).
• 17% come from non-ISP companies (such as CBS, Credit Suisse, Dun & Bradstreet, General Electric, Medimmune, NBC, NCR, New York Life, Pfizer, Schering-Plough, Sun Microsystems, Tesoro Petroleum, USAA, Wyeth...).
• 3% come from universities.
• 3% come from government agencies (federal, state and local).
• In a separate cross-section, about 95% come from the United States,with international visitors from Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand, Portugal and Switzerland.

The mix likely depends on the specific stocks involved and the time of day of the visit.

In summary, most Yahoo! message board participants seem to be at home in multi-layered (fictional user name and ISP IP address) anonymity.

The geographical and corporate spans suggest that at least some message boards offer both the independence and the diversity prerequisites to wisdom (see our blog entry of 5/6/05). There is not enough information in IP sourcing to infer the presence of valuable private information.

See also our blog entry of 4/1/05 for a lesson in message board manners.