It's insane to me that anyone on this site is even asking this. What's next: Should I be led to believe those little ads at the bottom aren't scams? The ones that say something like, "SHOCKING! Dentists in <your area> don't want you to know this trick that could save you thousands." Maybe the guy trying to sell me speakers from his van really is a trustworthy guy. I just got a call from someone saying my laptop is infected with malware and needs $400 wired to India to fix. I can't prove definitively he's lying, so I guess I should consider him a valuable resource.

Just go look at Infowars or Zerohedge for 5 minutes. I'm not sure what to tell you, if you come out of that thinking that they're not trying to take advantage of suckers.

It was a rhetorical question, but since you tried to earnestly answer it I’ll bite.

If you read Matt Levine’s Bloomberg column (I highly recommend it) then you’ll eventually encounter a point he repeatedly makes about institutional investing: the best opportunities are always right at the edge of comfortable. Hidden gems tend to hang out in the same neighborhoods as outright frauds, metaphorically speaking.

I check ZeroHedge daily, not because I “trust” it as a news source, but in accordance with the principle I alluded to above: the really good stuff is probably going to be hidden among outright conspiracy theories and psyops. Most of the crap on ZH is just crossposts from various blogs anyway so it’s pretty easy to filter through it.