Election Section

NEW YORK — For the purposes of raising or lowering the price of a stock, a rumor is often as good as a fact. And the makeup of the current market makes it a setup for rumors and so-called informed opinions. 

Lucent Technologies knows a thing or two about the situation, its shares briefly plunging almost 30 percent last Wednesday on rumors it would file for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy law. 

The swift decline was halted only after company officials issued a statement calling the speculation “baseless and irresponsible.” Even then, however, the stock failed quickly to regain all that was lost. 

Today’s marketplace is a setup for such shenanigans. News not only travels in a flash but reaches more eyes and ears than ever before because of a proliferation of electronic devices. 

The makeup of the marketplace is a factor. Millions of new, small and sometimes gullible investors are active investors and traders, and many still have the ambition of making a quick, easy, clean killing. 

In fact, there is a new urgency in the marketplace. If a year ago the goal was to make an easy fortune, now it’s to recoup at least some of what was lost. And so eyes and ears are alert for rumors, opinions and advice. 

Strange, after a year in which so many “experts” were shown to be fools or spinmasters looking after their own interests, there are more experts than ever. 

They broadcast their views on TV, pose for magazine covers, dispatch communiques to the media, and fill mailboxes with newsletter promotions suggesting that you too can enjoy 500 percent profits by subscribing now for a limited time at this low, low price. 

That’s half the problem. The other is that investors look, listen, buy and too often lose, seldom wondering why the advice peddler must sell subscriptions at a discount, or why he has to labor at writing a newsletter instead of simply clicking a key to make 500 percent profits. 

Examination might show that the letter writer never made 500 percent profits – never picked or owned the 500 percent stocks – but simply illustrated his brochure with examples of stocks that did enjoy such gains, subtly suggesting his stock picks might do the same for you. Because of “the frenzied atmosphere of hype,” editors of The Babson Staff Letter caution that the “current environment is very different, and riskier on a short-term basis,” from conditions before the 1990s. 

It expressed the intensity of its concern by turning over its entire letter of March 30 to excerpts from a book by Howard Kurtz, “The Washington Post” media reporter. 

Kurtz’s book, published by Simon & Schuster, is aptly entitled “The Fortune Tellers,” significantly subtitled “Inside Wall Street’s Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation.” 

Amid the daily deluge of spin, rumor, touting, speculation and manipulation, including manipulation of the media, says Kurtz, “there’s one inescapable problem: Nobody knows anything.  

“All of them – the journalists, the commentators, the brokers, the traders, the analysts — are feeling their way in a blizzard, squinting through the snow, straining amid the white noise to make out the next trend or market movement or sizzling stock.” The message is clear: Listen and learn but defer decision-making to nobody else. Make your own decisions, slowly. Do your homework. You can see through the whiteout as well as those who call themselves experts. 

John Cunniff is a business analyst for The Associated Press