Spam Stocks
Over the five days of my Christmas break, my personal email account, which I’ve had since 1999 and has been published on webpages since then, received 176 emails. Of those 176 emails, only 10 were actual emails; the remainder were junk, spam, phishing or virus/trojan emails. That works out to a little over 5% of my received email was actual email. While I’m sure that I’m not a typical example, I think that the email situation is only going to get worse, and for ISPs paying for bandwidth, that will translate into reduced profits.
Anyway, I digress. What I found interesting about the junk emails I received was that there were more ‘hot’ stock tip spam emails than normal. That got me wondering about how those stocks end up doing in the long run. Because for the most part, stock tips done on a grand scale such as this only really result in a short lived spike, which is good for anyone who already owns the stock but not so good for anyone buying right now. The result of my curiousity is the Spam Stock Tracker, a neat site that tracks how various stocks did after the spam emails first appeared. The results, as to expected, aren’t good for a naive investor. Almost all the stocks dropped and most dropped dramatically (down 80% or greater).
Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:20
