Penny stock spam. You've seen it, you hate it, you delete the emails regularly. In fact, you probably just received three of them in the time it's taken you to read these three sentences.
Stock spam emails are sent out by (dirty) web entrepreneurs who want to pump up the price of some unknown or worthless stock. They try to convince thousands of strangers to buy stock at an online trading house, thus driving up the price. Once the price gets high enough for their liking, they cash out. People who bought the stock on their recommendation – not to mention the people who invest in, own or work for the company being traded – are screwed.
Our man Joel sent us a link to the Stock Spam Effectiveness Monitor, a simple tool put together Leonard Richardson of Crummy.com that graphs the sale sprice of the stock and the volume of the corresponding spam.
The intricacies of the web make it possible to track both spam volume and stock price, so Leonard has set up a dedicated spam account to track which stocks are being pumped via email. He mashes that data with stock charts from Yahoo Finance.
Great idea. And he proves an interesting point: Stock spam actually works!
