Bashers come from other places besides stock traders. For instance...When Cliffs was looking to buy FWR, all chrome discovery companies were bombarded with negative worthless chrome posters and I am sure that some of the Ecologist organizations will use bashing as a deterent to the building of greenfield mines. Others are just individual traders not working with brokers who just want cheap shares or have lost money and are just plain upset with themselves and the company. There are also pumpers who don't care about the company, just the SP, and also need to sell that particular day.