Vman23 took the time to write an article about a different way of thinking about the current market. What are your thoughts? Post in the comments below for discussion. It is all very interesting conversation. Thanks Vman!

I was originally big on the notion that a series of reverse splits was exactly what the market needed to move ahead. I mainly based this on a supply/demand notion, figuring less shares would be less supply and find a point where demand would be satisfied.

However, I now believe that the supply/demand is not the engine that drives this market. What we’re really investing in are two things: 1. Innovation; 2. Fun/excitement. At this point, we have neither. The market has stagnated. Yet as we saw tonight as the market tanked and neared reverse split, there was a flood of action, people were hitting “refresh” over and over and there was legitimate interest. This tells me that it’s “action” we’re after, not simply profits.

How do we solve this? I know that the IPO scheme is mechanized, but as we see tonight, OS brass seem open to making changes that will help the health of the market so long as it maintains the core principles of their concept. I propose that the best way to generate fresh interest, spark movement and make the site fun, is to unleash a flurry of IPOs. Since there is fear a small batch of people will profit on the seemingly “unfair” (not my opinion, I think it’s a good system), small tweaks should be instituted. But the most vital part of this plan is to keep the IPO release incredibly small. 500 shares. Then let the market determine what happens. Maybe they split 5 times. Maybe 10 times. Either way, you can be sure that a flood of activitiy will follow. If you have 10-15 IPOs posted in the next week, you’ll raise the number of athletes by about 25 percent. At that rate, we can double the number pretty quickly. Will this destroy the value of lots of existing SOIs? Probably. But is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. But how better to see the force of a free market than to open it up in this way? I honestly see no downside to such a barrage of IPOs.

That leads to solution No. 2. There’ve been lots of calls for the 3rd party apps to get up and running. This is absolutely vital, because right now every stock is worth about the same. Float isn’t affecting price. Performance isn’t affecting price. Image is having a bit of an influence (AIRJ, KING, KOBE) but not nearly what it will to turn this into a game and add some sort of value to what are currently meaningless/valueless commodities.

Oneseason gave me and a lot of others a great hobby and it’s killing me to sit idle, waiting while a small group of big investors (I hold about 1000 shares, so you can determine how big/small time I am). We’re a short attention span generation and several weeks of NOTHING is about the only thing I see killing this site. It’s up to the honchos and the developers out there to keep the ball rolling, because I think we’re only days from OS falling off a lot of people’s radar. What better way than by unleashing Pierce, Ruth, Hamels, Gretzky and a dozen others on the OS faithful?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.