Over at Your 2nd Place, Nobody Fugazi reports on a study by researchers at the University of Nebraska, tantalizingly titled Deception in cyberspace: A comparison of text-only vs. avatar-supported medium.

The results indicate that in the text-only chat environment, subjects who were deceiving their partner experienced higher anxiety levels than those who were truthful to their partner; however, the same phenomenon was not observed in the avatar-supported chat environment. This suggests that "wearing a mask" in cyberspace may reduce anxiety in deceiving others. Additionally, deceivers are more likely to choose avatars that are different from their real selves. The results also show that the use of avatars in a computer-mediated chat environment does not have an impact on one's perceived trustworthiness.

So, I guess this won't reach everyone, given the number of people you still see in the Ginko group saying "Why is the ATM down?" but for those of you that do read it, your ginko former-savings should now be available as GPBs on WSE.

The process is not that complicated - you find a WSE atm in world (there's one on Ginko Financial Island, behind and to the right of the (defunct) Ginko ATM. Type reset password, follow the link to the website and off you go.

If you're determined to cash in your bonds by the way, you'll get a bad price. The best price currently available is L$0.14/share (this changes quite fast, it was L$0.15/share when I started this article), but there are a limited number of offers at that price. You'd be lucky to realise L$125,000 on 1,000,000 bonds (that's former savings of L$1,000,000) - that's 1/8th of the value of your former savings.

I have sold some to see how the interface works. I can't get it to offer me a market sell order, but set a limit sell order with the prices at the best market buy price and it goes smoothly and quickly. In my case I managed to withdraw the money in-world quickly too.

There is a good article here about your options. Nobody Fugazi has some bonds with GPB now (about 183,000 according to a different post), so he's not a disinterested adviser, but then, as you know, nor am I. As I've always maintained in all my financial advice, despite what others seem determined to think, it's up to you what you do. Speaking personally, I'm going to cash enough to be sure I can pay my tier come that time of the month even if it hurts. I'll put the rest up for sale at prices I hope will be reached and won't make me cry for the hit I'm taking.

As I commented here, Ginko has been in it's death throes for a little while. If you head over to their website now, you will see that they have shut for trading completely. I'm not sure what the financial equivalent of the doctor calling time of death is, but 7:30 p.m. yesterday (SL Time) is that time.

You can read commentaries on the death of Ginko by Nobody Fugazi and Benjamin Duranske, with some interesting cross fertilisation of comments.

Ginko has decided to convert all deposits into GPB at a 1:1 rate (based on face value), creating accounts for all its former customers on WSE, something that the close links between them doubtless help make easier.

Nicholas Porocarrero finishes the letter with the comment:
"Ginko Financial will bounce back from this and if you stick with us, you wll not lose anything. If you must sell the bonds, then you must sell, but I advise against accepting low prices."

Whilst I continue to maintain you should make your own choices about what you do with your own money, I've been fairly forthright in my attitude towards stock exchanges, so whilst I continue to wish Nicholas all the best, I, for one, will be selling, and if it hurts my pocket, well so be it.

As reported first on both Your2ndPlace and SL Reports (in that order according to my RSS reader) companies are abandoning WSE and heading over to ISE. They are all heading to ISE as well, none to AVIX.
In an entirely separate event, I happened to meet someone who has a company listed on AVIX which is currently trading shares at about half of the normal value. He directly, if without any supporting evidence, said "the cashing out of the gamblers is to blame" and was confident his shares would pick up. Confident enough to recommend them to everyone else.

In the meantime Nobody Fugazi has drawn together an interesting mix of topics to make some comments about transparency in dealings, everyone from LL down is touched within his article, and it's hard to see flaws in his logic. SL Reports has elucidated its transparency policy in line with SLEC guidelines - sadly I can't find a link to the actual guidelines anywhere. Meanwhile, an anonymous comment suggests WSE is editing (I would suggest the word they should use is censoring) critical comments from companies - you can't easily test all of these out, but google has cached some of the entries referred to, which you can no longer find directly... oops.

Phillip is rather regularly suggesting we, the residents of SL, need to police ourselves. Whilst I'm still not sure how we are supposed to enforce any such steps, there is, it appears, starting to be a consensus on steps the financial markets should take to make themselves more reputable.

Interesting times in finance in SL.

Or -- Yoda versus the Ad-Men

Nobody Fugazi has a bit of a gripe with an ad-man, and it seems that the ad-man has a worse gripe with Fugazi. An advertiser apparently bought up several plots next to Fugazi's land in Howelsen, and divided it up into 96 16sqm advertising spots. Ninety Six. All crammed together. This does not make sense.



Fugazi wrote about it on his blog, not mentioning any names, and decided to fight fire with fire. He placed some protest prims on his own land with an image of the blog posting. Like any other advertising prim, it's scripted so that you can read the post in full, if you so desire. So far, nobody's actually broken any rules...well, that didn't last long.