Silicon Investor is the first

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

that evaluated the stocks of

high-tech High technology (high tech), also known as advanced technology (advanced tech) or exotechnology, is technology that is at the cutting edge: the highest form of technology available. It can be defined as either the most complex or the newest te ...

companies. It is an

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

and

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

concentrating on

stock market A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks (also called shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include ''securities'' listed on a public stock exchange, as ...

discussion, with particular focus on tech stocks. Silicon Investor is currently owned and operated by Knight Sac Media Holdings. Billing itself the "first internet community", the site hosts 30 million message posts made by 90,000 registered users. In late 1996, SI accounted for 5% of the

AltaVista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

search engine index.

History

Silicon Investor was launched on August 8, 1995, just a day before

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

went public. It was founded in

Cupertino, California Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57,8 ...

by two brothers, Jeff and Brad Dryer. SI was the first

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

community to grow purely out of the

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. In November 1995, the Dryer brothers relocated Silicon Investor to their home town of Kansas City. The website was financed by membership fees charged and contributions from the founders. On June 24, 1998, Go2Net, a Seattle-based Internet investment firm, acquired of Silicon Investor for $35 million in Go2Net stock. At that time, the website was averaging 100 million

pageview In web analytics and Website governance, website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide W ...

s per month. The original staff continued to work on the site. Go2Net planned on integrating Silicon Investor with Go2Net’s Stocksite. In the early 2000s, during the crash of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, Silicon Investor started losing web-traffic to free messaging boards such as

RagingBull.com RagingBull.com is a website focused on financial literacy and day trading. History RagingBull.com was founded in August 1997 by Bill Martin with college partners, Rusty Szurek and Greg Wright, who were 19 years old at the time. It was begun in a ...

and Yahoo's YHOO Finance. Bryan Burdick the managing director of Silicon Investor at the time, however, dismissed speculations that Silicon Investor was losing traffic because of competing websites that offered free membership. Financial news and services website ''

TheStreet.com ''TheStreet'' is a financial news and financial literacy website. It is a subsidiary of The Arena Group. The company provides both free content and subscription services such as Action Alerts Plus a stock recommendation portfolio co-managed by B ...

'' speculated that Silicon Investor was losing traffic because renowned stock-pickers such as Tokyo Joe,

Anthony Elgindy Anthony Elgindy (November 28, 1967 – July 23, 2015), was an American stock broker, and financial commentator who founded Pacific Equity Investigations. Elgindy gained a reputation for his "investigations" of companies. Towards the end of his l ...

, and Barbara J. Simon who amassed followings on Silicon Investor, launched their own private websites similar to Silicon Investor. In July 2000, InfoSpace (now

Blucora Infospace, Inc. was an American company that offered private label search engine, online directory, and provider of metadata feeds. The company's flagship metasearch site was Dogpile and its other notable consumer brands were WebCrawler and MetaC ...

) bought Go2Net for $4 billion in stock. The following year, it fired Silicon Investor’s main moderator and investment guru Bob Zumbrunnen, whom ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' described as a cross between a “bouncer, diplomat, and traffic cop”. However, in May 2003, Zumbrunnen bought Silicon Investor from InfoSpace for $250,000 and relaunched it with a new design. In 2011, Snurf LLC, a web investment company founded by Silicon Investor’s original owner Brad Dryer (also known as Brad Fire), acquired the site. In January 2013, Knight Sac Media Holdings Corporation acquired Silicon Investor and announced a slew of updates to Silicon Investor, from the display of banner advertisements to signed-in users, to redesign of the home page.

Notable Members

Michael Burry

Michael Burry Michael James Burry (; born June 19, 1971) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and physician. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, which he ran from 2000 until 2008 before closing it to focus on his personal investments. He is best k ...

is a

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

and American investment fund manager who founded more than 25 message boards on Silicon Investor, including subjects on Value Investing and Buffetology. Burry joined Silicon Investor in November 1996. Between 1996 and 2000, Burry wrote 3,304 posts, on average more than two per day. Initially, fellow Silicon Investor members were skeptical that a medical professional knew anything about the stock market. Burry went on to found Scion Capital LLC, an investment fund that managed at its peak roughly $1 billion. Burry correctly predicted the

subprime mortgage crisis The United States subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010 that contributed to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, 2007–2008 global financial crisis. It was triggered by a large decline ...

. He was prominently featured in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' bestseller, '' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine'' by

Michael Lewis Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) Gale Biography In Context. is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to '' Vanity Fair'' since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. H ...

Daniel S. Loeb

Daniel S. Loeb Daniel Seth Loeb (born December 18, 1961) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is the founder and chief executive of Third Point, a New York-based hedge fund focused on event-driven, value-oriented investing with ...

, also known as Mr.Pink, named after the character in ''

Reservoir Dogs ''Reservoir Dogs'' is a 1992 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in his feature-length debut. It stars Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Tarantino, and Edward Bunke ...

'' became a member of Silicon Investor in July 1996. Loeb is an American hedge fund manager and the CEO of

Third Point LLC Third Point Management is a New York-based hedge fund founded by Daniel S. Loeb in 1995. The firm operates as an employee-owned and SEC-registered investment advisor with approximately $16 billion in assets under management . As of December 2 ...

. In 2000, Loeb was named as a defendant in a ‘cybersmear’ suit for allegedly running a

smear campaign A smear campaign, also referred to as a smear tactic or simply a smear, is an effort to damage or call into question someone's reputation, by propounding negative propaganda. It makes use of discrediting tactics. It can be applied to individual ...

on on-line messaging boards and forums, including Silicon Investor. Hitsgalore, an Internet marketing company, filed a $20 million lawsuit against five individuals, one of whom was Loeb. Hitsgalore claimed that several individuals tried to tarnish the company’s reputation in order to drive down the price of Hitsgalore’s stock. In his Declaration in support of motion to dismiss the

First Amendment First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

complaint, Loeb was forced to out himself as Mr.Pink. In April 2000, Hitsgalore withdrew the

lawsuit - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil actio ...

Anthony Elgindy

, born Amr Ibrahim Elgindy in

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

, was a member of Silicon Investor. Elgindy was known on the messaging board as Anthony@Pacific. He became a member of Silicon Investor in August 1998, and created his own message board, "Anthony@Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony”. In 1999, Silicon Investor banned Anthony Elgindy because his controversial postings violated the Terms and Conditions of Silicon Investor but later reinstated his membership after a user-vote. Elgindy subsequently opened a rival messaging site, ''WallStreet Strand''. In May 2002, Elgindy was arrested by the

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

racketeering Racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. Originally and of ...

and

insider trading Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company. In various countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information ...

charges. Federal prosecutors alleged that Elgindy bribed an FBI agent to obtain

classified information Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to know, ...

in order to manipulate stocks. Without offering any proof, a federal prosecutor also accused Elgindy of having advance knowledge of the

9/11 The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial ...

attacks, a charge Elgindy’s lawyer called “ludicrous” and an example of “racial profiling”. Elgindy was never charged in connection with the attacks. In January 2005, Anthony Elgindy was convicted of racketeering,

conspiracy A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between persons (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agree ...

, and

securities fraud Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a deceptive practice in the stock or commodities markets that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information, frequently resulting in los ...

. Elgindy was sentenced to 11 years in prison and was ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution.

Tokyo Joe

Yun Soo Oh Park is a South Korean immigrant who ran a chain of burrito restaurants in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. Park was known by his online moniker ‘Tokyo Joe’. In 1997, Tokyo Joe became a stock-picker when he began posting on messaging boards such as Silicon Investor and

. Tokyo Joe had written thousands of posts giving investment advice and advertising stock picks. In 2000,

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

(SEC) filed civil fraud charges against Tokyo Joe claiming that Tokyo Joe used his online popularity and influence to increase the value of certain stocks. The SEC claimed that Tokyo Joe urged investors to purchase stocks without disclosing that he owned those stocks, which he planned to sell. In February 2000, Tokyo Joe paid a $750,000 fine to the SEC.

Silicon Investor and the First Amendment Rights of Internet Users

In 1999, the stock price of 2TheMart.com, an

online auction An online auction (also electronic auction, e-auction, virtual auction, or eAuction) is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with d ...

company, plunged after three

class action A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class actio ...

lawsuits were filed, alleging that the company had misled investors and engaged in securities fraud. To defend itself against the lawsuits, the company claimed that it needed the identities of 23 Silicon Investor members who had posted messages critical of the company using pseudonyms on a Silicon Investor message board specifically devoted to 2TheMart.com. 2TheMart.com’s lawyers issued a

subpoena A subpoena (; also subpœna, supenna or subpena) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of ...

requesting that

InfoSpace Infospace, Inc. was an American company that offered private label search engine, online directory, and provider of metadata feeds. The company's flagship metasearch site was Dogpile and its other notable consumer brands were WebCrawler and MetaC ...

, then Silicon Investor’s owner, reveal the users’ identities. In 2001, a Silicon Investor member who used the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

''NoGuano'' enlisted the help of the

ACLU The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

and the

Electronic Freedom Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore (activist), John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor ...

to try and quash the subpoena. In April 2001, U.S District Court Judge Thomas Zilly sided with the Silicon Investor member and ruled that Internet users had a

right to remain anonymous.“Federal Court Upholds Anonymous Speech on Internet”
‘’

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

’’ April 20, 2001 The Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the verdict as “a clear message that the court will not tolerate lawsuits designed to chill online speech.”

Silicon Investor Sitemap

Silicon Investor is divided into 3 ‘top level’ discussion

s: StockTalk, Politics, and Pastimes. Within StockTalk, there are six sub-forums: TechStocks, Biotech, Non-Tech, Gold/Mining/ Energy, Microcap, and Strategies. An additional forum, the “Site Forums” category available through the site-wide “SI” menu includes subjects boards related to site news, new feature discussion, a welcome thread and other housekeeping topics.“About Us”
‘’Silicon Investor’’ The header of Silicon Investor displays five menus: SI, Mail, SubjectMarks, PeopleMarks, and Tools. Through the SI menu, users can access the Member Store, Site Forums, review site policies and access the site FAQ. The mail menu provides user access to messaging from other members. SubjectMarks helps users keep track of their favorite subjects and save favorite posts. PeopleMarks allows users to follow the postings of other Silicon Investor members. The Global Tools menu gives users access to basic and advanced search features, profile maintenance, user settings and custom stock portfolios, a new feature.

External links

Silicon Investor

References

{{Reflist, 1 Web portals Financial services companies established in 1995 Internet forums