RE:RE:why wouldn'tspeculator wrote: Like I said, the sell off on Friday did not just happen, insiders knew.
A stock does not trade 3 million shares and frop nearly 50% for no reason.
The market has been signalling this news release all along.
speculator,
My hat off to you. Was there also a pump & dump scheme? What do you think?
Topical Reading: Excerpts
Teen Stock Wiz Charged With "Pump and Dump"
(September 24, 2000) A precocious teenager has been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] with manipulating stock prices for personal profit, known as a "pump and dump," becoming the youngest person ever charged by the agency.
The SEC said Jonathan Lebed, now 15, had purchased stocks through a brokerage account set up by his parents, and then posted hundreds of phony Internet messages on web-based bulletin boards boasting that the stocks were undervalued and would soon take off, urging readers to invest now before word got out about the stock value. The stock price would then be manipulated upwards and the boy would then be able to sell at a substantial profit.....
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Unfortunately for Lebed, the SEC had been monitoring his trades since 1998 and earlier this year finally decided to accuse him of securities fraud.
Arthur Levitt is the chairman of the SEC. He says Lebed seems to have mastered an age-old wall street swindle called the "pump-and-dump." Says Levitt, "A pump-and-dump is really buy, lie and sell high."
But Lebed sees it differently. "Yes, (I manipulated stocks), but I wasn't doing anything wrong...I wasn't posting any kind of false information," says Lebed, who asserts the hundreds of recommendations he posted, sent out under many different names, were all based on his research.
Levitt doesn't buy it. "(Lebed) used fictitious names. He made predictions...without any foundation," says Levitt. "The purpose...was not to help investors...but rather to line his own pockets as soon as he hyped the price of the stock."
Lebed disagrees that the messages he sent out were nothing more than bogus chat room hype. He says his recommendations were always based on accurate information and sound financial analysis. His attorney, Kevin Marino, says the only things Lebed may be guilty of are not fully understanding the finer points of securities law - and perhaps a little over-enthusiasm.
The distinction, according to the SEC, is that the Wall Street analysts Lebed watches on television are not supposed to profit personally from their own predictions. But even the highly regarded financial publication Barron's seemed to believe that Lebed "adapted standard brokerage house procedure and put out wildly bullish buy recommendations larded with fancy...what little Jon seemingly wasn't aware of was that only chartered financial analysts are legally entitled to engage in the practice."