Agoracom Blog

Blackballed By The Big Boys On Bay Street

Posted by AGORACOM at 10:08 PM on Thursday, April 1st, 2010

It’s Holy Thursday and I should be heading for my annual midnight appearance at church, so I will keep this short and continue over the next couple of days.  Specifically, one good thing about today is that I can finally open up to a reality that we’ve been living with ever since the following:

AGORACOM Noront Community Serves Notice That Main Street Now Has Muscle. Staves Off Hedge Fund In Board Battle

Aurelian Shareholder Revolt HUB Hits 816,000 Page Views (Past 30 Days)

Most on AGORACOM know these stories very well.  For those of you who don’t, have a quick read as I’m just too tired.  The fact of the matter is that, despite doing our job and teaming up with members to launch two of the greatest online retail investor revolts in recent memory, AGORACOM was blackballed immediately after both events and the repercussions haven’t stopped hitting us ever since.

We did our job.  We even created some history – and we got blackballed.

Why? As one prominent executive in the small-cap mining space told us “You cost a lot of these big guys a lot of money….and they’re not happy”

The old guard simply doesn’t want retail investors to have a say. Buy stock or don’t buy stock, we don’t care. Just shut up and take a seat at the back.

Believe it.

More later.

Happy Easter.

George

5 Responses to “Blackballed By The Big Boys On Bay Street”

  1. Bill says:

    Well if you can get thousands of retail investors to change the direction of a board or takeover plan, surely you can get them to flood the OSC with letters and phone calls demanding fair treatment.

    The truth is that power serves it own ends and businesses are not democracies. But they benefit from opening ownership up to a public that thinks shareholding is a form of business democracy. You and your members actually demonstrated that principle a couple of times and clearly those in power didn’t like it. To them it is supposed to be a democracy in name only.

    In my opinion your best bet on this is to come out strong, fight hard, spread the word and get your public behind you in every way possible. I’m sure your lawyer will tell you otherwise, lol.

    And I think you and Peter ought to do another Money Markets and Life hosted on his site, and devote a whole show to telling your side of this affair. I think you owe it to yourselves, each other, and your listeners to do that.

  2. AGORACOM says:

    John, thanks so much for your great words and support. Great to know the site has been so valuable to you and we plan to be here for a very long time.

    Regards,
    George

  3. John says:

    Agoracom has provided a much needed service. It has allowed knowledgeable responders/investors the forum to share fact based additional information. It all helps us retailers to better understand what the companies press releases mean. best wishes to continued success at Agoracom.

  4. AGORACOM says:

    Ken, thanks for providing the great words of support. To be clear, I can’t say the OSC is “in hoc with the big guys” but I don’t think it is a coincidence that our Bay Street blackball and the resulting pressure started coming down once AGORACOM and its members created history via the online revolts at Noront and Aurelian Resources.

    We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we’ve pissed off people whose grand plans were disrupted by AGORACOM and its members. When you foil the plans of a Hedge Fund to take control of Noront and force a major gold producer to renew its “friendly” takeover 4 times – all while being embarrassed by members fighting back via the media and YouTube videos – rich people start getting angry.

    When rich people get angry, they start calling their friends.

    Regards,
    George

  5. Ken says:

    Thanks for providing a forum for retail investors. The OSC should know that retail investors go to the site with eyes wide open. We recognize the possibility of abuse on these forums and do due diligence ourselves to protect against that. We don’t need regulators in hoc with the ‘big guys’ shutting valuable pipelines of information. And you wonder why people start believing in conspiracies!

    Again, thanks for your work and best of luck in this battle.