Today we introduce a column by Thierry Martin, a columnist who picks stocks every day for the Web site Fiasco Trade of the Day. We think it'll quack you up. Drop us an email to let us know what you think.

Visit the most popular online stock-picking sites and you'll have a hard time finding one without spelling or grammatical errors on the home page. Almost all are run anonymously.

Related Stories

The Nature of the Minx

Time May Not Be on Your Side

Two Tech Troikas Speeding to the Grave

Sector Watch: Nortel Wreaks Havoc on Telecom

Beautiful Moves in the Dow, but Odds Say It's a Bear Market Rally

Still, despite this lack of respect, and their overall amateurish quality, they do offer the do-it-yourself traders who subscribe a means to take care of their own money. The traditional brokerages, with their absurd stock rating calls, offer the same service, only several weeks, or maybe months, too late.

Stock-picking sites are aimed largely at people who can't get a hot stock tip from their doorman or some new source at a party, so they represent the most speculative part of retail. Like margin use and penny stock investing, they are a leading indicator of speculative bubbles.

In reverse, a decline in the popularity of these services would indicate a washing-out of the overhang of the fast-money crowd, or the people who bought a stock yesterday in order to sell it to you today. This would be good news for people who insist that a "meaningful" bottom will occur only when we've rid ourselves of this weight pressing down on the market.

At my office, in order to keep up morale, every time a new subscriber registers for a free one-week trial it causes our computers to generate a loud duck-quack alert sound. We typically register from five to 10 subscribers a day. Last Thursday, the quacking stopped.

I have never, in the year I've been doing this, heard it so quiet. It seems that as soon as the Nasdaq broke below 1800, the average retail player threw in the towel.

This market has been searching since last April for the equilibrium point where speculation and investment are in balance and not mutually exclusive. Like a dentist searching for the last bit of infection during a root canal, the Nasdaq has been hunting for the "cry uncle" level for months now. We may have found that point last Thursday, finally.

Todd Harrison, in his postings on RealMoney.com, often quotes an old saying that it's far better to teach a man how to fish than to just give him a fish.

Well, at my stock-picking site, we just give out the fish to investors who don't want to, or have the time to, learn how to fish for themselves. And for the past few days, they don't even want any fish. It's quite likely that we have reached the point where the damage done to the average speculator has resulted in his or her total withdrawal from the market place.

Of course, what we didn't have in the past, and will probably see in the future, is the sudden reappearance of these opportunists at the first sign of a dramatic rally. We witnessed this at the beginning of this year, when many professionals were horrified to see the former highfliers behaving exactly as they had before, going up 15 points in a single day and driving even veterans to abandon trading.

My guess is that the Nasdaq's rebounding into the 2200-2500 range will lead the fast money back into the arena, restarting the cycle.