STORY: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF STEVEN SAGE
Unfortunately, my memory isn't that good. For a good resource, people might want to check out Josef Svejk's History of Silicon Investor thread. I know I have spelled his name wrong.
The weirdest thing I can remember on Silicon Investor was Steven Sage's Short Term Trades thread.
Sage started a thread with a plan to trade $50,000 in real money and report his trading on the thread. He said it was a small inheritance or something; I believe he was in his mid 20's. He was into a couple of sub-sectors of tech stocks in particular. He made some good calls and some bad calls. When things were really down, he got really sad and moody. People began helping him keep track, offering picks, cheering him on, etc. He developed a healthy following. I stumbled on him because he frequently made the hot subjects list.
When his money ran really short, he made a huge bet (something you would never do) on something he'd already lost money on. It bounced a bit, so he got back to par. But before long, he was losing money hand over fist again...people started badmouthing him. Most of the thread jumped all over the critics. It got nasty.
One day, Sage announced that he had "made the necessary arrangements to access the remainder of the trust fund", and was going to redouble his efforts and begin trading with $250,000 in fresh money. He started pissing this away too, gradually. The critics slunk away when he enjoyed periods of success.
Then someone got real aggressive, asking for Sage to prove his trades. Sage had become sloppy, reporting large buys of stock at times that had low volumes - it was easy to verify that he had not bought at that time. OK - one or two mistakes - Sage managed to hold things together and convince everyone that he was on the up and up - though a week or two of "fax me your confirmations!!!!" bickering dominated the thread.
Again, the Sage defenders began hounding the critics. I was one of Sage's early critics, mildly suggesting that his stock picks were poor and that his averaging-down strategy made no sense, especially in the companies he was investing in. Sure, lose $5,000 that way, but if you have an inheritance, spread some of it around conservatively. Sage had been all over me like a cheap suit for that unwelcome advice.
There were more layers to this than any of us had known. Sage was playing some of Sage's critics, as well as some other abusive or strange characters on other threads. He altered his typing style and punctuation, sometimes pretending to be a woman. He had a couple of signatures though - one was that his idea of what constituted tech investing (certain sorts of telecommunications hardware companies) tended to give him away. Anyway, it was all part of an elaborate game of multiple personalities, more elaborate than anyone could understand. This was one deranged character.
Shortly after the "fax me your confirmations!!!" arguments, Sage made a few final ludicrous bets, and lost them, and his house of cards came tumbling down. He was forced to admit that he was a fraud. What's more, he didn't really defraud anyone, but spent a long time making up stories, which made him a pathetic fraud.
Game to the end, he decided to milk his "confession phase" for all it was worth. There were layers even to his confessions, and "Sage" re-emerged later, in "waves".
Peeling back as many layers of the Sage onion as possible, one thing seemed clear. "Sage" wasn't for real. The "real" Sage might have been learning to invest about a year previous to this, starting out with $5,000 or $20,000 and losing it all - and he became increasingly depressed, lonely, and addicted to the net. Then again, this was one of Sage's several 'true confessions', so it may not be true.
Oddly, some of the folks who had begun discussing short-term trading on Sage's thread, and using spreadsheets to track three or four portfolios (mostly 'real money' as I recall), just moved all the talk off to a new thread. It was as if the fact that Sage never really existed hadn't made a dent. He went away without so much as a pause for breath, or a short eulogy.
No one ever apologized for flaming Sage's critics, or felt embarrassed for rushing to his defence. Then again, some of those people were Sage.
Our communities, be they towns, cities, or virtual 'families' always have a dark side, it seems.
END OF STORY
PS Thanks for making me #77 on the GNET 'list'. Cool number.
PPS I am not Sage! I am real! I will even fax you my confirmations, if and when I trade. Any portfolios I have posted online have been deliberately set up as 'model fake portfolios'. |
