Tuesday, May 10, 2005

A stock even a wunderkind could hate

Possibly the seminal event of the depths of the bear market in early 2003, was when none other than Jonathan Lebed, the teen who rose to fame as a bubble-era stock guru before getting in all kinds of hot water with the SEC, starting putting out sell calls on his new site. If ever there was a moment in recent memory to say, this shorting business has gotten too easy, time to switch back to the long side, that was it.

The stock Lebed put out his first short call on? REFR.

Mind you, ever since, the sins of Lebed have been transferred to all of REFR's critics by the promoters, but as usual that misses the point. Which is, when you're the first short idea from someone known up until that point (and, for all anyone knows, ever since) as a permabull, man, you know you're on the bottom of the barrel.

Yet still the suckers buy more and more.

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