Gary Weiss

At their worst, message boards can subject you to mindless braying or outright stock scams. But at their best, they provide meaty insights on just about every stock imaginable.

Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.

People are told their rights when they're arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are entitled to the same courtesy.

I'm rooting for Saudi Arabia getting a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

In the struggle against sexual discrimination on Wall Street, Pamela K. Martens is a latter-day Rosa Parks - a woman who, metaphorically speaking, refused to sit in the back of the bus.

Shorts wager on price declines by selling shares that they have borrowed in the hope of buying them back at far lower prices.

Conspiracy theories feed on opacity, and that's a longtime problem with short selling. Large long positions must be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in public filings, but not large short positions.

The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.

All too often, the pitchmen are selling the notion that if you gain 'control' over your financial destiny - pick your own stocks and execute your own trades - it will be the first step on a short road to riches.

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.

The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices.