Don't feed the trolls!

Of course, there can also be a funny and occasionally annoying downside to posting one's thoughts online. Last week I was amused to read some derogatory remarks about my opinions from an anonymous blogger, who wrote about "the crap peddled by Kuznetsov from FINAM". This fellow said that he "knew more about investing in kindergarten" than I do. Funny, I never thought about investing in preschool. Maybe this guy is one of those exiled Russian oligarchs posting in disguise?

This week I had to laugh again when I was awarded a nice title from yet another anonymous detractor on the Web. The author of this particular site freely admits to hating Russians and frequently compares almost anyone who may have an optimistic view of today's Russia to apologists for Hitler and Stalin. According to this online character, I have produced a "magnum opus". Well, I'm flattered, and speaking for me and my colleagues at FINAM, we found this website comical, droll, farcical, hilarious, humorous, hysterical, laughable, ludicrous, ridiculous, riotous, risible, screaming, side-splitting, and uproarious. Truly we have all been enlightened with a plethora of English-language superlatives thanks to this person.

As one of my American readers who runs a real estate business in Krasnodar said, it is unfortunate that the Russian "blogosphere" seems to attract these venomous types, who try to bait people into pointless arguments with name calling and confuse the virtual personas and claims they have made up with reality. Nonetheless, I doubt that anyone working at J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs is reading their stuff.

It is a fact of the Internet age that once you express an opinion online using your real name, any anonymous crank can post whatever crazy things they want to say about you online. But I decided to have some fun with it by printing and framing the screen shot from my newest fan's blog. It is now proudly hanging on the wall of my office. Finally, I have an award to show off for writing about investments in Russia and Russian IPOs!

You can read the original post at Vladimir Kuznetsov's blog, Equity Financing in Russia. The views expressed in this post and on his blog are the personal opinions of Vladimir Kuznetsov, and are reproduced here solely for educational purposes. To read more Russia Blog posts about Russian capital markets, click on the finance section or type www.russiablog.org/finance in your web browser.

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