Somebody is not telling the truth Danny Boy or the paid promoter
TT Financial. Any ideas MG??
New York, March 9 (Bloomberg) -- That whiz kid stock-picker
has turned from hot to hot potato.
After weeks of adoration by his followers, Daniel Miller,
the ninth-grader whose market-moving Web page we discussed here
last week, is taking his lumps from those who loiter on the
Silicon Investor Internet spot that Miller launched.
Miller's ''Short Term Picks From the 'Whiz' Kid,'' an
Internet discussion group started on the Web site by Miller on
Feb. 7, has become less reverential and polite than it was,
prompting a Silicon Investor administrator to post a message that
the administrator has received ''numerous complaints.''
Message-posters have been accusing Miller of everything from
acting as tool of stock promoters to front-running his own
recommendations -- brokerage-speak for hoarding shares for
yourself before you tell the world to buy.
Miller says he does not front-run.
Even those who would profit by Miller's touts are working to
disassociate themselves from the 15-year-old.
''I don't think I ever talked to him,'' says Larry McNabb,
who runs Twin Towers Financial Group and promotes Filtered Souls
Entertainment Inc., a stock the whiz kid touted.
(Miller says, however, that he did speak to Twin Towers.
Considering that McNabb says he's a one-man operation, either
Miller imagined the conversation or promoter McNabb is distancing
himself from the tout who helped goose the stock price of his
only client. It would only be weirder to learn that Kenneth Starr
had disclaimed the assistance of Linda Tripp.)
Fuzzy Methods
Since December, Miller has been posting market-moving stock
recommendations on his own Web page
(www.angelfire.com/biz2/dmnews/page/html) called DM's Penny Stock
Picks, as well as separately getting his touts out on Silicon
Investor. He leaves some holes in his research, and has a
bothersome tendency to believe what he reads in press releases.
(Referring to McNabb in a posting March 3, Miller wrote ''He is a
nice guy etc.Just because he is getting payed (sic) it doesn't
make him bad.'') While that might not make him any worse than
some grown-up purveyors of investment advice, it is somewhat
unsettling that Miller is naive enough to speak openly about such
things as leaks about his own stock picks.
He said last week that he was miffed when Bloomberg
criticized him for putting out a market-moving stock
recommendation on Filtered Souls Entertainment, a record company,
without ever having spoken to management (which might have shared
with him the sorry news it shared with Bloomberg when we called:
no earnings and negligible revenue.) ''There is no reason to
speak to the company when I was speaking to the paid promoters --
Twin Towers Financial,'' he said.
Either-Or
That McNabb of Twin Towers has no recollection of having
spoken to Miller leaves you with the uncomfortable either-or that
McNabb is scared stiff of associating with a market mover who may
not know the rules or that the market mover never spoke to anyone
affiliated with management.
Chat on the Internet since March 3 has sometimes mercilessly
bashed Miller, with name-calling and put-downs related to his age
at the extreme. Discussion on another Silicon Investor discussion
group, or ''thread,'' called ''Secret Squirrels hit!'' has
message-posters blasting Miller for supposedly telling friends
about picks in advance -- something Miller denied in e-mails on
his own thread.
More troubling than the accusatory messages posted by his
increasingly vocal -- albeit self-interested -- foes, though, are
those posted under Miller's name. In a Feb. 15 e-mail to Miller
on the Silicon Investor site, someone calling himself
''Lucky888'' had complained he was ''down big time'' because he
''loaded up'' on shares of Eagle Capital International Ltd. at
Miller's suggestion. A return message from Miller minutes later
is apologetic: ''Ouch. I am very sorry lucky...For that I will
have to let you in on my stock pick early next time.''
Ethan Caldwell, general counsel at Go2Net Inc., which owns
Silicon Investor, says it is likely that postings under Miller's
name really come from Miller, because ''the real Dan Miller would
come out and say 'Hey, that's not me' pretty quick.'''
'Company Playing Me'
Miller has admitted other shortcomings that, while perhaps
committed out of naivete, might give securities regulators pause.
On March 2 on Silicon Investor, he said of Filtered Souls
Entertainment, his big recommendation of Feb. 22, ''the company
is playing me,'' explaining that ''they tell me one thing and it
doesn't happen.''
The youngster makes no mention of such worries, though, on
his own DM's Penny Stock Picks Web page, where followers might
logically head to see if his opinion had changed.
Miller similarly talks openly about the ability of his
followers to figure out what stock he might recommend because he
hints about what he's working on. In an e-mail complaining to me
about the March 3 story about him, Miller objected that I had
referred to the movement of stocks in advance of his
recommendations. ''I give hints as we all know,'' he wrote.
''That is called people figure it out.'' (On March 2, he hinted
on Silicon Investor that the next morning's tout would be of a
Nasdaq stock trading around $1, with no earnings to back it and
management in the middle of a ''refocusing'' of the business).
Age No Barrier
The SEC would not discuss whether Miller, with his
oversights and hints, might be doing anything that warranted
regulatory action, but a spokesman was willing to say that the
agency is not restricted from bringing an action because of a
person's age. As to any worries about the regulators -- among 16
other questions faxed to him March 7 -- Miller would not comment,
saying he had work to do researching stocks and doing his school
work. (He did, however, point out that his Web page discloses
both that he is not a registered investment adviser and that he
may own the stocks he touts).
But Harvey Pitt, former enforcement chief at the SEC who has
represented such securities law violators as Ivan Boesky, says
Miller offers regulators the potential for an action on
allegations that range from inadequate disclosure to as much as
fraud. ''What is required is that people know what they're
getting when they tune into you,'' says Pitt. ''And my assumption
is that he can't do that because if he did, nobody would pay
attention to him.''
Indeed, in his interviews with Bloomberg, Miller has
conceded that he never spoke to management of one recommended
company and that he was unaware of litigation by another with
Chase Manhattan Bank, its key lender. In the case of Filtered
Souls, he said that management with a spotty track record should
be given the benefit of the doubt ''because you have to give
these people another chance'' -- not the stuff of a professional
recommendation.
Stanton M. Pikus, chairman of Canterbury Information
Technology, whose stock doubled in price in the first hour after
a Miller tout March 3, said he's never heard from Miller, and has
no promotional firm that might have spoken to Miller on his
behalf. Yet it was Miller's most recent pick of the week.
Pitt, for his part, thinks the public should know how Miller
works, and that Miller should rise to perhaps more grown-up
standards. ''If you're going to play like an adult, you'd better
get it right.''
Jon |
