Gary Weiss Investors Quotations

Broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have propelled once-obscure financial journalists such as Maria Bartiromo to celebrity status and made CNBC to investors what ESPN is to sports fans.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

Numerous academic studies have shown that amateur investors make poor traders - buying stocks for the wrong reasons, holding losers for too long, and acting on whims and emotions.

I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities.

The media and marketing deluge has spawned a new type of Wall Street loser: the armchair momentum player. These are novice investors who engage in short-term stock buying and selling based on media reports or an expert's enthusiasm.