Sometime yesterday I posted a comment to this fraudulent site and filled in the reviewer comments that they left out of their article on Amazon reviews of Wall Street vs. America. Unsurprisingly, the comments were later removed as they don't really bolster what they want people to think. They know people will just eat up what they say and not check for themselves.

Note to the uninformed: Everywhere they use "...", they removed something.

Classic selection bias: http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Selection_Bias

I only looked at the reviews of Wall St vs. America. There's all kinds of other selection bias at work there. There are 17 total reviews of the book, including 2 "real name" people and 1 top 500 reviewer.

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Removed from the Rich Golden review:

"Particularly convincing as an antidote to the hype surrounding hedge funds. Scorching on that topic."

This one is funny because they can't say it was for space reasons. One sentence. Wow. What a fraud.

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George had this cut out:

"It begins on a note of pathos by telling the story of a poor sap who was plowed under by the Wall Street arbitration system. But that is pretty much the only time you have to reach for the handkerchief.

The rest of the book is a romp that rips apart mutual funds, hedge funds, the financial press and above all the regulatory apparatus, which Weiss dubs "the self-regulatory pyramid."

This book is surprising at times. I would have expected it to excoriate Richard Grasso and his big payola from the New York Stock Exchange. Instead Weiss makes the point that Grasso earned his pay by making the exchange immune from market forces that otherwise would have driven it out of business.

That is one recurrent theme in the book, how Wall Street embraces the "free market" only when it is convenient.

Throughout we get a good insider's sense of how Wall Street really works, stripping away all the hype and phony sales talk. Weiss's essential point is that investors need to take more responsibility for their financial lives and stop relying on Wall Street "professionals" to tell them what to do.

Interestingly he does not fall into the trap of calling for more regulation in a kneejerk fashion, though he does favor a levelling of the playing field to prevent abuses of the kind that befell the arbitration victim that begins and ends the book. "

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This is removed from the Marty Ross review:

"You learn in the opening chapter how the magazine's judgment had become so clouded by the herd instinct that by 2004 it had turned its back on wide areas of investor concern.

The book is also merciless in describing other people in the media. Here is one priceless line: Institutional Investor magazine is described as "smooth as a baby's bottom, deferential as a midshipmen, as indicated by the acronym, 'aye aye!'" At times I laughed out loud reading this book.

Unlike Born to Steal, which was excellent for different reasons, this book moves out of the netherworld and takes aim at the really big names. Though I am employed in the securities industry and have been for some decades, there are things that I did not know.

My only point of contention with Weiss involves index funds, which are his main remedy for Wall Street's ills. I think that is kind of like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If everyone bought index funds, it would be a major liquidity issue for Wall Street.

Also he says that Wall Street loves the arbitration system, when a lot of brokers don't like it either.

However, these are just nits. The book is on the whole a very enjoyable read, and also very enlightening."