Return of the Spam Stock Tracker

A few years ago, we noted with wry amusement Joshua Cyr’s Spam Stock Tracker. Well, Josh is back with an updated version that is worth your while to check out.

A few items worth noting:

1st, the site has ads, and I got a kick out of how unintelligent the Google AI is for serving ads on the site — all penny stock promoters! So much for machine intelligence.

But for a bigger laugh, the numbers since back in 2005 are pretty astonishing: 

Total Cash Outlay: $70,987.00
Total Value as of
10.2.2007:
$4,917.70
Net Profit: – ($66,069.30)

That’s a total return of negative 93.07%!

Spam_stock_tracker

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Discussions found on the web:
  1. Todd Mentch commented on Oct 4

    I will mention here what I suggested to Josh several years ago: what happens if you employ some reasonable trading rules, such as stops at 5-10 down and profit taking at 10-20 and 50 % up?

    It would be interesting to see those numbers.

  2. Pool Shark commented on Oct 4

    “That’s a total return of negative 93.07%!”

    Looks like the spam tracker may make a great short play!

  3. Mikael commented on Oct 4

    Not that I think you should buy these stocks, but Josh says that if the stock is worth 0, its either cause of bankruptcy, or cause it changed tickers and he didnt track it. so loss is not as big as he says…

  4. Bob_in_Mass commented on Oct 4

    Some enterprising firm should come out with an ETF that bets against spam promoted stock…

  5. joshua cyr commented on Oct 4

    Todd, I thought about putting that in the new site, but honestly didn’t have time this week to build it in. The trick is I coudl automate it if I could find a nice web service to give me historical data, but most of the stocks I track don’t get that data returned to me for some reason, so I can’t easily do a % thing, or multiple scenarios without instead tracking the price every 15 min and saving the data, etc. Kind of a pain. I did think about tracking what would happen if I sold after 1 day, 2 days, and lifetime.

  6. A Dash of Insight commented on Oct 4

    Sector Rotation and ETF’s: The Need for a System

    We are attempting to comment weekly, each Thursday night, on the subject of system trading. We are using our own TCA-ETF model as an example, mostly because things are easier to see when the illustrations are clear. We expect the

  7. Dun Khnow commented on Oct 4

    Anyone know what happened to SSE Composite Index (Shanghai)? It hasn’t been reported since it was up +2.64% on September 28th.
    Did it rocket past 6,000 already, so they
    cut off Western media coverage to prevent
    a run on Northern Sachs?

    “The fascist merger of State, the penultimate banking sector out of New York City, and certain corporate groups (see oil industry, military defense) stands as the most glaring threat to free market capitalism in the modern history of the nation. Yet it receives no challenge.”

    Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t China news.

    “… officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews … warning – for the first time – that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter trade pressure from the US Congress.”

    There we go. Then there’s this related:

    “America should seize every opportunity to force regime change in Syria and Iran, a former senior adviser to the White House has urged. “We need to do everything possible to destabilise the Syrian regime and exploit every single moment they strategically overstep,” said David Wurmser, who recently resigned after four years as Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser.”

    David Wurmser is a Swiss-American dual citizen, and like Israeli-American dual citizen Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Defense, has never served in the US armed forces. Neither, for that matter, has Vice President Dick Cheney, or Republican Presidential Candidate Rudy Guiliani, or Permanent Representative to the UN John Bolton, all draft dodgers, but hey, Goopers make filthy lucre hyping Nuremberg-defined ‘ultimate war crime’.

    Back to China, “The hottest selling book in China right now is called “Currency Wars,” which makes the case that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a puppet of the Rothschilds banking dynasty. It has persuaded some top officials in Beijing that they should resist America’s demands to appreciate China’s own undervalued currency, the yuan.”

    China, with $1.3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves as a result of the massive and growing $260 billion U.S. trade deficit, has taken huge losses with the falling US dollar, given that some 80 percent of China’s $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves is held in U.S. dollar assets, largely in U.S. treasury securities.

    Anyone know what happened to SSE Composite Index (Shanghai)?

  8. Aaron commented on Oct 4

    This is hilarious. I’ve always known that those spam related stocks were pure garbage, but goodness I didn’t expect they would be THAT bad. Interesting little tracker.

  9. Blogrolle commented on Oct 6

    Spam-Aktien

    Eine Spam-Mail:

    Die fr Montag angepriesene Aktie verdient wohl eher keine Kaufempfehlung. Mit Fearless Intl Inc geht es an der Brse eigentlich nur bergab
    Joshua Cyr hat ein Spam-Mail-Aktienportfolio angelegt – natrlich nur ei…

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