A CHORUS OF TRUE BELIEVERS

By ADAM COHEN/ATLANTA

The Rainforest Cafe's Motley Fool message board--an online repository of comments about a fast-growing chain of rain forest-themed restaurants--is a cyber lovefest. Investors delight in the restaurants' lifelike robot birds and monkeys, gleefully report on the long lines to get in, and cheer on the company's latest expansion plans. With the stock's meteoric rise--up some 700% since its IPO last year--postings often lapse into euphoria: "I love this company"; "I love every dollar I have thrown into it"; and the group's oft-repeated rallying cry, "Let it RAIN!!!"

The intersection of cyberspace and Wall Street has produced an unlikely offshoot: the message board as quasi fan club. Some of today's highest-flying stocks are being cheered along by a chorus of believers singing their praises online. U.S. Robotics, a red-hot computer-modem producer, has been touted by hundreds of postings with headings like, "Buy USRX any time!"

Cybertalk of this kind has begun to have an identifiable impact on stock prices. "In an informal study we did of about half a dozen stocks, we've seen a close correlation between messages, stock volume and prices," says Marc Beauchamp, a spokesman for the National Association of Securities Dealers.

Board players revel in the notion that they are in the know. They note that the boards are often filled with such vital information as strategic plans, growth projections, competitive analysis and sophisticated discussion of new products. In the Intel folder, contributors regularly discuss dram pricing and its likely impact on the stock price, while in the Merck board, doctors have weighed in with their views of Fosamax, the company's new osteoporosis drug. "It's the kind of concrete information Wall Street used to have a monopoly on because they were the only ones with the money to perform the research," says Randy Befumo, who composes the Motley Fool Evening News under the nom de cyberspace MF Templar.

But many investment experts nonetheless remain wary of what they disdain as cybergossip, which is usually delivered anonymously. "The problem is you don't know who you are speaking with and why they are giving you advice," says David Weisman, director of money and technology strategies for Forrester Research Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After all, many posters, as they are called, have a financial interest in the stocks they are discussing.

Skeptics predict that cyberinvestors will find out how good they really are when the bull market heads back to earth. Indeed, some cyberchatters have already learned about gravity. America Online's stock, the subject of 19 Motley Fool folders of analysis and prognostication, has been hammered by worries over future growth that no amount of cheerleading can solve. A deathly pall recently fell over a Motley Fool message board for CAI Wireless Systems--a wireless cable company--when its stock zoomed north and just as quickly turned south. One poster berated those who lost money: "Do you really have anyone but yourself to blame for buying a stock after it doubles on the recommendation of someone having no real identity?" At least one stockholder, writing under the screen name Shoym, delivered a sad mea culpa: "I read the hype, I bought near the high, and now I am quite angry (with myself, of course)." Some things won't change. A bum stock tip produces the same old result, whether in cyberspace or on Wall Street.

--By Adam Cohen/Atlanta