Joel on Software

Pump 'n' dump spam

Laura Frieder and Jonathan Zittrain: “The average investor who buys a stock on the day it is most heavily touted and sells it 2 days after the touting ends will lose approximately 5.5%. For the top half of most thoroughly touted stocks, ... a spammer who buys at the ask price on the day before unleashing touts and sells at the bid price on the day his or her touting is the heaviest will, on average, earn 5.79%.”

Leonard Richardson has a site which monitors daily stock spam activity. You can see from his charts that buying these scammy penny stocks is a guaranteed way to lose money.

Leonard, by the way, is the co-author of Ruby Cookbook, 906 pages of shiny, nearly perfect Ruby code with detailed explanations of everything, this book is a fantastic way to learn Ruby.

His wife works at Fog Creek Software; if you've emailed us lately and heard back from someone named Sumana, that's her.

Work with me, here! Fog Creek Software has great paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They’re in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.