I can't believe a board member of a company, let alone the CEO thinks that the yahoo finance message boards are anything better than a place for day traders to post profanity-ridden, anti-semitic, anti-liberal, pink-sheet boosting nonsense!

"anything better than a place for day traders"

That's exactly what it is, and it is completely filled with trolls like this. I used to go on there and there are people who will sit there posting the same flame every five minutes.

I think the idea is to try to influence all the stupid daytraders to do X and see if it bumps the market...

At least he wasn't actually posing as a woman called Deborah. He doesn't look very feminine. He doesn't look like my vision of a typical troll; he is thinner and does not have a moustache. Perhaps all the oats and rabbit food he eats has withered his brain. He had so much to live for, so much love to give, and he has thrown it away.

Makes you wonder how he had time to run the company, what with all these posts to the Yahoo messageboards. I wonder if he had a posse of people who agreed with him, using similar grammar etc.

Didn't Yahoo shut their message board a while back, because the posts were almost uniformly racist, anti-Israel/Palestine, murderously so?

"Makes you wonder how he had time to run the company, ..."

He didn't run the company - he was the CEO. His job is to tell other people to run the company. ;)

As someone who was a poster on Yahoo and the other stock chat boards, I can tell you that they could be a popular forum for discussions.

(Hint: Just ask Informix's former CEO's (Dexmier, Finnochio, and even Gynes) about Gumby. ;-)

The point is that if you can control the board, remove the "flamers", "spammers", and idiots who are trying to make an off topic political statement, then its possible for these boards to have a decent forum for discussion.

If you know the industry and the company, its very possible to make posts that could effect the price of the stock. However, its very difficult to do so.

As an officer of a competing company, posting to chat boards, or even maintaining a public blog, could be dangerous. In this case, IMHO, the SEC should look in to his attempt at manipulation of the stock. Especially if he posted during the time that the acquisition took place.

If it could be proven that he posted when he had knowledge of non-public material events, then he's definitely in hot water.