Stock Spam (2)

About nine months ago I remarked that it would be rather cool to track the performance of stocks recommended in spam. It seems that someone has beaten me to it – spamstocktracker.com ran throughout May and June of this year. He bought 37 stocks, of which only three were up at the end of the period, by 4%, 8% and 124% (hey, there’s occasionally a good apple in the barrel. These are real companies, after all). His total loss was 45% – which isn’t bad, I’d have actually expected worse.

4 thoughts on “Stock Spam (2)

  1. Curiously, I had exactly the same thought over the last weeks, but hadn’t had the chance to spend any time looking at it. At least I don’t need to bother now :)

    Are you coming down to Brighton for UKUUG this week?

  2. Exactly what I thought when I saw the site.

    Re UKUUG: No – I’m afraid I’m on a company trip to Copenhagen!

  3. I was amazed at the fact that spam stocks performed at all. I thought that they would have done much worse than they did. Does anyone know if those spam stock emails have an impact on the stocks themselves from their distribution into people’s email boxes?

  4. On the one hand, you could probably get a decent return from “shorting” the stocks. That 45% loss becomes a 45% gain (minus transaction costs). If you combine that with purchasing put options instead of just shorting, you can get further leverage (if puts are available).

    Of course, both of those strategies tend to be “bad” for the company and since the company is rarely the one sending the spam I’d feel bad to implement a strategy like that…