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Friday, December 21, 2007

Viva Wall Street...

Stock Pickers Paradise!

Can't Lose Tip

My Doctor told me about this new drug...

Stock tips. OK. Most of us at one time or another have heard a juicy stock tip. Whether out playing golf, on a blog or from a friend these little glimmers of fast money dance in your head.

I once had a boss who was enamored of them. This was a non-drinker, non-smoker, non-gambler who was straighter than fresh cut wood. When we went to Las Vegas for trade shows he wouldn't play the nickle slots, as it was a bad investment!

So one early January a co-worker and I told him I heard about this experimental drug Oigaleb. It was Italian and not on the market yet. It cured some horrible disease and was in stage IV clinic trials. That we could get in for a small investment. It WAS a risk though, but it had a 50/50ish shot at a 100% upside.

He offered to write me a check right then for however much I wanted!

I said OK, but their are three types; the red vaccine, the black vaccine and a really experimental green vaccine, this one was extra risky, but it had a 1800% upside, but only a 1 in 18 shot in being the one. Only one of these could come in, but according to my guy it was a 100% probability that one, and only one would.

He then asked, "What was the most he could invest?"

"$50,000"

"Per vaccine?"

"Uh...yeah"

"Done!"

He then proceeds to write me a check from his ETrade account for $150,000! At this point we stopped him and explained that we were talking about Roulette, and Oigaleb was Belagio backwards! Not a drug...He played it off like he knew all along, but it really did wake him up. What he was doing was gambling not investing. If you want to do that, go to Vegas at least they will comp dinner if you lose...

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice comparison there!!

I recently got a fascinating kind of spam. It was fax spam and misaddressed. It was a printout of some "fact sheet" about a stock with a note on it written from "Pam" to "Janet" about how she'd just gotten a tip from a guy who worked at the company and whatnot. It was supposed to look like the fax got missent and we were lucky enough to receive it. Clever trick, I thought. And faxes have the advantage over e-mail because you can include handwritten notes...and somebody has to check the machine.

Noel Larson said...

Thanks Mrs. M!

Pretty tricky fax idea!Amazing to the level of which they will sink. I always imagine a big warehouse in some dark remote country with nothing but rows of fax machines and computers randomly generating the latest stock picks, Irish Lottery winners and Nigerian Princes.

I guess if there is a sucker born every minute, there are 525,600 new targets a year for them...

Fecundity said...

Nice comparison. I bet it really would help some investors figure out what they're actually risking. Hint: In future, to perfect your pseudo-scam, make the drug be in Phase I, II, or, if you really must, Phase III trials. If it's in Phase IV, it's already on the market, and thus must already have been shown to work. Tylenol is still often the subject of Phase IV trials.

Mrs. Micah, I've seen that fax scam too. Tricky. I bet they really do have rows and rows of faxes in a warehouse somewhere, making poor 'Pam' repeatedly look like an idiot.

Noel Larson said...

Oh well...Reason #438 why I wouldn't be a good con artist!

Basically it comes to this: When you try for easy and fast money, it rarely ends up being either!

Anonymous said...

That is so funny - that a sane non gambling person could still see acting on a stock tip as investing, as opposed to gambling.

I have done it once - but never again!

Noel Larson said...

Yep, that's the real point.

We all have a desire not to be out of the loop on these investments. Everyone mentions the secretaries at Microsoft who were millionaires, but they forget about the million other start-ups that went nowhere.

Right Plave /Right time can have alot to o withit!

Thanks for reading!

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