Good post Herb. I have often wondered what percentage of the float is held by readers of this and other forums. I would guess around 3% at most.

There might be more, except that a lot of the readers have lives and many shares, so they feel that the annual summaries are enough. Even then, I bet less than 10% of retail investors read more than a paragraph of those before recycling them.

Educating the retail investor can not be done on forum websites, where we talk about rumours and make personal commentary. It has to be done on the company sponsored websites, which need to be current, informative and easy to manoeuvre. Noront's new site is very good for that, but Freewest and Spider were very lax on theirs.

The investing industry has taught us that a 10% annual return is pretty good, and if you are getting 15%, then you are doing very well.

This is why we see a lot of see-saw action I think. Investors are selling on the highs and moving on. When the price falls, they may come back to repeat the cycle. They can make 10-15% gains a couple of times a year with the current volatility, which is stellar in their mind. They aren't it in for the long run, and really have no idea what the Ring of Fire means. They have no idea that holding for the long run would net them doubles or more on their investment.