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Pastimes : Jonathan Lebed, 14 Year Old Boy Fined 1/4 Million by SEC -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Follies who wrote (58)	9/21/2000 9:10:39 PM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 172

dale, It is perfectly permissible to identify yourself (not necessarily by name, but perhaps some background and experience) and express an opinion on a stock. Other people are then free to accept or reject your opinion. You haven't presented yourself as an expert, or a guru. You've clearly labeled your post as an opinion, and this is perfectly permissible under our laws. Clearly it is exercising the right to free speech. This is what stock chat threads are all about. It's a place to freely exchange thoughts, opinions and facts. Where people get into trouble though, is when they falsely inflate their credentials, or fail to disclose that their positive opinions were paid for by the company being touted. Or perhaps they've have some other compensatory reasons for posting misleading opinions. In this case, the young man left people with the (false) impression that he would be holding a stock until it went from $2 to $20 per share. Perhaps he "overstated" the values and virtues of the company just a tad? I don't think so. It was clearly his intent to sell his own holdings into the increased volume (and increased per share price) that his postings created. So posting wasn't simply cheerleading. He had a short term profit motive. And that motive makes all the difference in the world as far as what is acceptable and what is not. Had he held on to his investment, rather than selling into the excitement he created, perhaps you could make a point that he was merely an optimistic cheerleader. But he didn't. And the repeated pattern of buying, hyping and selling is what did him in. KJC

To: Follies who wrote (58)	9/21/2000 9:11:34 PM
From: Don Pueblo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 172

You may be missing the point. Lebed bought shares in a publicly traded company, then went on the Internet under several different false names and hyped the stock that he secretly owned. When the stock went up, he sold it. He planned it all out before it happened. He paid over a quarter of a million dollars in fines, which gives me the distint personal impression that he was guilty, and the SEC allowed him to get away with it. Here is the applicable law: law.uc.edu Young Jon thinks he is too cool for school now, but he's too stupid to even see the truth, and the truth is that he is a lucky-ass kid. The truth is that anyone with a securities license of any kind that did what this punk kid is alleged to have done would probably be either in jail or worried about going. That's the difference. Your Goldman Sachs analyst may be a bonehead and he may make a really stupid call, but if he gets caught committing securities fraud, he's in some very, very, very deep ca-ca. Some people live in a dream world. Some of them occasionally wake up in a real room with a lock on the door. Sometimes that's what it takes for them to realize they were in a dream.