Here is an idea i have had for a while.. can /pol/ please poke holes in this idea? If you can't find any holes in it, can you link to any known pump and dump newsletters or chat rooms you know about?
Penny stocks are often the targets of pump and dumps. Criminals who pump and dump typically have a time frame in mind; they will buy slowly over a period of months, then pump the stock and then sell in a matter of days after their announcement.
One idea I have had on my mind for a long time:
If you were to retrospectively analyze 50 pump and dumps, and find that they were pumped for an average gain of, say, 100%, what then stops you from subscribing to the criminals newsletters and email lists, buying immediately when they pitch the stock, and then selling out as soon as it hits a 50% (n<100) gain?
Over the long term this seems like a profitable trading strategy, and I believe that it's legal.
lol oops i said /pol/ but clearly i meant /biz/
hi op. ive been wondering this too, as i sort of tried this once before.
bear with me: a few years ago i was hanging out with my brother's girlfriend's brother who kind of wanted me to mentor him on how to do ad arbitrage. we talked about lots of different things and one thing he showed me was a penny stock that he knew was a penny stock pump and dump. he had read the guy's newsletters back to back and relayed to me how the stock had moved, and going by the wording and stuff, and the dates mentioned in the sequence of newsletters, it was pretty obvious what the next move was going to be.
i had like $40 in some mining stock that hadnt moved in a long time so i was like let's try it, why not, sold that stock to get the $40, then bought the penny stock. i asked him to check to be SURE that he hadnt gotten another newsletter since the last one mentioned, because if he had, that would change the plan to the other direction and we should be shorting instead of buying. he said there was no other email, and in my own laziness i didnt force him to check because i was just more curious about what would happen than i was about making like $5 or something.
(i had never seen penny stocks before and didnt really know much of anything about stocks, so the concept of seeing a stock actually be pumped or dumped before our eyes, as a true scam, fascinated me and i just wanted to see if it really worked that way.)
but this guy was kind of a goon and it turned out there WAS another email that he hadnt bothered to check for, naming a date or retracting something they'd said previously or something, and so the stock got pumped and we (I) got suckered. it didn't matter to me at the time, and it only matters to me now in that i would like to be able to say to you 'yeah, its possible to beat the scam like that, i did it once.' But the point is that it WAS, at least in that case, obvious enough to be predictable, and it was merely laziness that prevented us from winning. contd. >>
i never revisited the idea because i was always working on other things, but its something ive been curious about again lately.
ever get those advertorials in your (irl) mail? they're like fake magazines all centered around shilling some stock, and the whole thing talks about the applications for some new product or technology and how it'll be used the tech, medical, military sectors etc., and then (not very) subtly reminds the reader of the manufacturing company's stock ticker? i have some of those saved in the closet somewhere because i like that stuff, ill have to dig them out. but that's what those are for, they're for pump and dump scam stocks, like you asked about earlier, signing up to their newsletters and things.
i still dont know much of anything about stocks, so here's a seriously newfag question for anyone: don't all pump and dump stocks get dumped eventually? wouldnt the mere identification of a pump and dump scam guarantee you eventual profit because you KNOW that it's going to hit $worthless eventually so you short it whenever and then just wait?
let me know what you think, OP.
>>1729317
Thank you for your reply. If anyone reading this is serious about looking into this with me we could start a skype/email/fb group to work together, at least during a research phase.
> fake magazines all centered around shilling some stock, and the whole thing talks about the applications for some new product or technology and how it'll be used the tech, medical, military sectors etc., and then (not very) subtly reminds the reader of the manufacturing company's stock ticker
Exactly. Just yesterday I clicked a mobile ad and wound up here:
www.energyandcapital.com/report/avoid-an-investment-meltdown-start-with-these-three-uranium-stocks/38
Some of the "direct response" companies that produce these subscriptions/newsletters are absolutely massive. They are hundred+ million dollar companies that have been doing this for decades and the company they are pumping is sometimes a client of theirs. People working in management at these companies definitely could profit based on this inside information, and they surely do.
Shorting may be more dangerous, as you would have to time the dump correctly.
On the other hand, if you simply check that the last 30 day average is what you are buying at (because you are the first "sucker" to buy in) and then dump your shares as it rises, your downside is more limited as even after the dump it should return to roughly the price you purchased at (the un-manipulated price).
Ofcourse you would mess up sometimes or get unlucky but this is about averaging returns over hundreds of trades.
Actually you could buy and then sell after X% gain, and then use that cash to short it on the way down. so you could do both.
this all relies on being able to pull this off consistently though.
What was the newsletter your friend was subscribed to? Could you post any obvious pump+dump newsletters you know of so i could watch them in the coming weeks?
http://stockreads.com/