One of the great things about options is that—particularly with a strategy that involves a rudimentary execution—there's a clear time frame for assessing how thorough and correct your analysis was... I thought it'd be really useful to work through some of the old posts on here and sort out some telltale indications that a post was either a) made by someone who wasn't acting in good faith; b) made by someone whose advice shouldn't be followed for another reason; or c) made genuinely, but with a fundamentally-flawed mental model. One that I'd followed with a fair amount of interest came with the (ominous) title:
[$AMZN: Free Money Glitch](https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/1h8kkzk/amzn_free_money_glitch/)
(Fortunately for this exercise, the person who originally made the post no longer appears to have an account here, so we don't have to worry about stepping on any toes or hurting anyone's feelings.)
The short summary: The OP appeared to genuinely assert that their AMZN calls were "free money" (spoiler: neither of the positions they touted even finished in the money), and did a writeup for AMZN after its multi-month run-up that featured a bunch of reasons for why AMZN was destined to go up for the foreseeable future. In individual posts (if I remember correctly), they even went so far as to claim that another poster could feel comfortable that it (and any other large tech company) would certainly be over their current price in 2-8 weeks. Essentially, they framed AMZN stock as a particularly high-yielding savings account.
I'd definitely be interested in hearing from some of the people who immediately replied that his post made for a good short signal (even though that wouldn't have worked out easily or comfortably either), as well as people who found it compelling and jumped on the bandwagon he was attempting to create.
Even though I'm very far from a proponent of a strong version of the efficient market hypothesis, when I see a poster that frames the stock market (and even moreso... individual stocks) as capable of supplying a return that is disproportionate large relative to its risk, I immediately become suspicious that the poster is either very naive or not very bright. My suspicions are also stoked when all the metrics that they use to validate their thesis are backwards-looking and readily available to anyone who wants to look for them.
Generally, what are some indicators that people can look for (in the future) that will be a clear sign that a post (like the "Free Money Glitch" post) should be ignored?