OK, TIME FOR A LAUGH. PZ SAYS STOCK TOUT PAID PROMOTER IS "the voice of reason." PZ Party Like '90s,Though Much Else Has Changed. lol
To:Big Dog who started this subject
From: pz Monday, Mar 19, 2001 1:14 PM
View Replies (3) | Respond to of 26459
Big Dog,
Congrats on the new thread and thanks for being the voice of reason. :o)
Paul
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Mike Nichols of Clifton, N.J., doesn't worry so much about global matters. A former textile coatings salesman, Mr. Nichols rose to cyber-fame as "Big Dog," partly by doing online battle with Tokyo Joe. Mr. Nichols had enough online friends and foes that someone started a stock-chat thread, "The Life and Times of Big Dog."
Mr. Nichols focused on trading "penny" stocks, low-price shares issued by mostly little-known companies. He did well enough to quit his job, buy a new house and live the high life, routinely carrying a cash roll of several thousand dollars. The prosperity also contributed to an eating and drinking binge that sent his weight ballooning up to nearly 500 pounds. The 6-foot-5 Mr. Nichols is now battling diabetes. "I need to lose about 200 pounds," he says.
While he says the diabetes has sapped his energy, he still makes his living trading. While staying loyal to penny stocks, he has also started dabbling in the shares of Enron Corp. and Tyco International Ltd. These stocks are volatile enough that "you can make money on the bounce," he says.
Some things have changed, he acknowledges. Small companies used to pay him large amounts of stock to consult and help promote their companies online. But with the bursting of the market bubble many of those stocks became worthless. "I've got millions of shares that I can't sell," he laments. Still, he adds with a laugh, "trading stock is the easiest way in the world to make money."
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Stock-Chat Vets Party Like '90s,Though Much Else Has Changed
By JOHN R. EMSHWILLER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Tokyo Joe is still busily issuing e-mails, although now from the south of France. Big Dog still dines off pennies. Janice and Pugs continue to duke it out.
The Internet-fueled stock bubble of the late 1990s is a lingering hangover for most investors. Many thousands who flocked to online stock chatboards and made them a force in the financial markets have gone back to other pursuits. Message traffic on some of the most popular chat sites is down by as much as two-thirds.
But amid the rubble, there remains a dedicated core of veterans, including some of the best-known online names from those wild and crazy times. Surprisingly, they continue to do pretty much what they were doing in the go-go days -- though they say it's often on a smaller scale and more careful than before. "Now, the market is like a dog with rabies," says Yun Soo Oh Park.
Under his online moniker of Tokyo Joe, Mr. Park went from running a small midtown Manhattan burrito restaurant to being one of the best-known stock pickers on the Internet. His online messages posted on Silicon Investor (www.siliconinvestor.com), a popular chatboard, mixed stock picks with humor, invectives, colorful travel tales and a seemingly endless supply of commas that Mr. Park preferred to periods. He eventually started charging for his stock picks through a private e-mail service, called Societe Anonyme.
In January 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mr. Park with defrauding an estimated 3,800 Societe Anonyme members through such alleged tactics as failing to disclose that he was contemporaneously selling shares in stock that he was recommending. Mr. Park settled the SEC suit, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, and paid $755,000 in various penalties.
After all the negative publicity from the SEC charges, Mr. Park decided to leave Manhattan for France. "I bought a villa overlooking the Mediterranean," says Mr. Park, resplendent in black shirt and pants and a flowing white coat with matching scarf, during a recent visit to New York.
Mr. Park still operates Societe Anonyme, where the Web site (www.tokyojoe.com) still proclaims "Moments of glories,,,desires,,,wealth,,,in the end all an illusion." Societe Anonyme membership is now about 280. Mr. Park says he is happy with a smaller membership, which pays higher fees than in the old days -- up to $200 a month now.
Mr. Park says some of his trading tactics have changed from the boom times. He does less trading, about five to 10 transactions a day compared with more than 100 daily in the past. "This market will whiplash you like a scolded woman," he wrote in one recent e-mail to members. His e-mails are still loaded with commas, color, typos and opinions -- lately many of them about the war in Iraq. "Even if we win the war ,, we lost a huge in global politics," Mr. Park wrote in one recent e-mail. He says the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime will bring only a temporary surge in stock prices. He predicts that continuing world economic weakness will push the Dow, currently at 8351.10, to 5000.
Mike Nichols of Clifton, N.J., doesn't worry so much about global matters. A former textile coatings salesman, Mr. Nichols rose to cyber-fame as "Big Dog," partly by doing online battle with Tokyo Joe. Mr. Nichols had enough online friends and foes that someone started a stock-chat thread, "The Life and Times of Big Dog."
Mr. Nichols focused on trading "penny" stocks, low-price shares issued by mostly little-known companies. He did well enough to quit his job, buy a new house and live the high life, routinely carrying a cash roll of several thousand dollars. The prosperity also contributed to an eating and drinking binge that sent his weight ballooning up to nearly 500 pounds. The 6-foot-5 Mr. Nichols is now battling diabetes. "I need to lose about 200 pounds," he says.
While he says the diabetes has sapped his energy, he still makes his living trading. While staying loyal to penny stocks, he has also started dabbling in the shares of Enron Corp. and Tyco International Ltd. These stocks are volatile enough that "you can make money on the bounce," he says.
Some things have changed, he acknowledges. Small companies used to pay him large amounts of stock to consult and help promote their companies online. But with the bursting of the market bubble many of those stocks became worthless. "I've got millions of shares that I can't sell," he laments. Still, he adds with a laugh, "trading stock is the easiest way in the world to make money."
There aren't many chuckles coming out of the respective corners of Janice Shell and Gary Dobry in their seemingly endless sparring. Ms. Shell, an art historian, rose to prominence as a self-appointed cybercop looking for stock frauds, which flourished in the '90s. Unlike most Internet stock chatboard participants, Ms. Shell posted under her own name.
Mr. Dobry, an artist and boxing gym proprietor, who used the online moniker "Pugs," was an investor in a small company that Ms. Shell began criticizing. Soon, the pair was trading hundreds of insulting electronic messages. He once described her as a "sick depraved 2-bit stock hustling old lady." She once suggested that he had received a failed brain transplant -- from a mouse. Each became convinced that the other was part of one or another cabal.
Nowadays, Mr. Dobry says that he is trying to focus on his painting. But he often clearly still has Ms. Shell on his mind. After a recent interview about the Internet stock world, Mr. Dobry sent the reporter two dozen e-mail messages critical of the market activities of Ms. Shell and others. "I hope you are watching how Janice is using you to smear me," he wrote. "THIS IS DISINFORMATION TO POO-POO THE TRUTH!"
"Unfortunately, my life has been largely taken up with the insane Dobry, his equally insane friends and their insane legal actions," Ms. Shell wrote in a recent e-mail. She is a defendant in a defamation suit in Chicago federal court filed by a friend of Mr. Dobry's. She denies wrongdoing.
Mr. Dobry says that while he still reads the stock messageboards, he no longer posts messages. Ms. Shell is still busily writing away, having penned an estimated 100,000 messages over the past seven years, spending several hours online daily. Ms. Shell, who says she doesn't trade stock, sometimes thinks about cutting back her online activities. "But you know how addictive it is."
Write to John R. Emshwiller at john.emshwiller@wsj.com
Updated April 14, 2003 10:57 p.m. |
