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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Amazon Natural (AZNT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Janice Shell who wrote (9250)10/23/1998 11:41:00 AM
From: Spider Valdez  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 26163
 
you also foget to say other reasons way short squeeze with bb stock can fail. a lot of guys only pump and dump. they say they are part of cartel or group to pump stock. then they sell before this group. they become basher then. they post stuffs to scare shareholders so they sell and they try to get halt of stock. example,

> To: +John Fairbanks (3692 )
> From: +tonto
> Tuesday, Sep 2 1997 4:02PM ET
> Reply # of 13117
>
> Add my 10,000 shares to the cartel.
>
> Tonto
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________
> To: +Ga Bard (2699 )
> From: +tonto Thursday, Sep 4 1997 12:47PM ET
> Reply # of 8820
>
> I bought at market. 25,000 shares were at .032 and after not
> getting any more filled, I
> filled the order at market. Big deal .006 and .007
> more.
>
> If you believe the group here have legs, it may be a good idea to
> get your shares now
> and not worry too much about the little difference.
> The movement is meaningless at this point.
>
> It is very positive, but we want OVIS movement. Look what can
> happen
> when a group jumps in, .18 to $3.90 in a couple of weeks or so. Now
> you are talking
> profit.

penny stock bashers will also call reporters to get hatchet piece done about stock they are bashing;

> Talk : $5 and Under : Amazon Natural (AZNT)
>
> | Previous | Next | Respond |
>
> To: Spider Valdez (8648 )
> From: Janice Shell
> Thursday, Oct 8 1998 10:43AM
> ET
> Reply # of 9220
>
> this question is better asked of 2 guys who called this reporter.
> it is easy to figure
> this out they left there names (this time!) lololol!
>
> I hate to tell you this, Spidey, but everybody knows tonto's name.
> It isn't exactly a
> secret, wink wink LMAO nudge!

but sometime this can back fire on the penny stock basher and we get this;

Today: October 22, 1998 at 11:55:49 PDT
LV health supplement firm in complicated battle
By John Wilen <wilen@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN

Las Vegas herbal medicine company Amazon Natural Treasures Inc. is locked in a
legal battle with a group of off-shore brokers it claims stole and began
illegally trading shares of its restricted stock.
At the same time, the company is orchestrating a "short squeeze" against
investors who have sold the very same shares of stock short.

This planned squeeze was helped along by a federal court's Oct. 2 decision
granting an Amazon demand that two brokers stop trading some 4.48 million
restricted shares the company says it was hoodwinked into issuing to offshore
brokerages earlier this year.

If the squeeze works, said Amazon President Mike Sylver, it "is going to end
all short selling in this country as we know it."
In short-selling, an investor makes money if a stock declines. The investor
borrows shares of a stock, typically from a broker, and sells them at the going
rate. After the stock declines, that investor repurchases the shares at the
lower price, returning them to the broker from whom they were borrowed. The
investor's profit is the difference between the higher price at which he or she
sold the borrowed shares and the lower price at which he or she bought the
replacement shares.
Short selling can backfire. If the investor guesses wrong and the stock
increases in value, the borrowed shares still have to be replaced, or "covered"
in investment parlance.

In a short squeeze, a company deliberately limits the supply of its stock,
driving up the price and forcing all investors with short positions to cover
their borrowings at highly inflated prices. The goal is to punish short
sellers, who many companies believe intentionally push stock prices down to
make profits from short selling.

Amazon's Sylver claims unscrupulous investors are short-selling Amazon shares
that are not even supposed to be trading in the first place. Sylver claims the
company was tricked into sending 4.48 million shares to Joseph Andy Mann,
managing director of First Concorde Securities Ltd., a brokerage with offices
in Nevis, West Indies, and Cancun, Mexico.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court last month, Amazon says it agreed
in March to sell two First Concorde clients -- Whitecliffe Investment Fund Ltd.
and Shoreline Securities Ltd., both also of Cancun -- 4 million shares for $1
million.

Amazon sent the shares, along with 480,000 shares Mann asked to borrow, to
Whitecliffe and Shoreline, but the money was never paid, Sylver says. Sylver
explained the shares were marked restricted, and were not to be re-sold until
40 days after Mann sent Amazon the money.

However, alleges Amazon's complaint, Mann unilaterally removed the restricted
legend from the shares, transferred them to First Concorde, and began selling
them on the open market through brokerages JB Oxford, of Beverly Hills, and
Canaccord Capital Corp., of Vancouver, British Columbia.

When Amazon found out the shares were being traded, the company threatened to
cancel them. That prompted Mann to file suit in California demanding that the
company honor its agreement. Mann claims he and Sylver orally renegotiated the
sales price to $78,000 in cash and 200,000 shares in a company called Back &
Neck Inc., a renegotiation Sylver denies ever occurred.

Amazon does not accuse any of the brokers named in its suit of short-selling.
But short selling became possible only after the shares hit the open market in
March, says Sylver. Before that time, the company's stock was closely held and
did not trade very often. From March to July, the company's stock declined from
nearly $3 to as low as 5/32. Trading volume, which had never passed 200,000
shares per day before March, has risen that high or higher numerous times
since.

Since the company filed its lawsuit in September, the New York Depository Trust
Corp. (DTC) which holds most physical stock certificates, has frozen trading of
Amazon shares. Investors, anticipating a squeeze in which short sellers will
have to scramble to cover their positions at any price, bid the stock back up
to nearly $2 in early September. The stock closed at 1 5/16 Wednesday.

On Oct. 2, Las Vegas District Court Judge Lloyd George denied a request filed
by Mann to dismiss the suit and instead ordered JB Oxford and Canaccord to
cease selling Amazon shares.

That ruling will have minimal effect until the DTC releases its freeze on the
stock. When Amazon filed its lawsuit, the DTC agreed to the company's request
for a freeze, a move that essentially makes it impossible for short investors
to cover their positions. Amazon will now ask the court to order the DTC to
release the freeze, and return the disputed shares to Amazon. At the same time,
Amazon is asking all shareholders to ask for physical copies of their share
certificates, and requiring all shareholders to exchange their shares with the
company for new shares with a new registration number.

According to court documents, more than 700,000 shares have been sold on the
open market through JB Oxford and Canaccord. The remainder of the 4.48 million
shares are held in accounts by those two brokerages. Sylver claims 2.8 million
shares have been sold short.

If the DTC-held shares are returned to Amazon, the number of free-trading
Amazon shares will drop, presumably forcing the price up further and making it
extremely difficult for short sellers to cover. For instance, an investor who
borrowed 100,000 shares of the stock at 50 cents hoping to profit from a
decline would have to come up with $150,000 to replace those shares if the
stock rises to $2. Investors who sold more shares short, or who borrowed at
even lower prices, would have to come up with even more cash to cover.

The squeeze will be completed by the company's request that stockholders place
requests for physical share certificates. Sylver anticipates that many brokers
will be unable to fulfill their requests. The reason: the investors who
borrowed the shares won't have the cash to replace them.
Sylver anticipates shareholder lawsuits against brokers, and broker lawsuits
against borrowing investors who can't replace the borrowed shares. And the
bottom line, Sylver says, is that many brokers will be very reluctant to loan
shares to short sellers in the future.

Whether all this works as Sylver plans remains to be seen. Several contributors
to message boards on the Silicon Investor stock information Web site contend
that Amazon is unscrupulous itself, and that the company is being investigated
by the Securities and Exchange Commission and NASDAQ stock exchange. Sylver
denies these charges and alleges himself that the Silicon Investor contributors
are short selling investors trying to drive down the company's stock value who
are being investigated themselves.

so i say to watch penny stock basher very well because they are real reason short squeeze in bb stock is hard. they pump and dump then they bash it for maybe a halt.

spider



To: Janice Shell who wrote (9250)10/23/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: tonto  Respond to of 26163
 
Interesting article:

Herb Greenwood

October 26, 1998

SECTION: FORTUNE INVESTOR/OPINION; Against The Grain; Pg. 320

LENGTH: 733 words

HEADLINE: Short-Sellers: The Market's Real Heroes

BYLINE: Herb Greenberg

BODY:
Go ahead--call me the chief apologist for those scoundrels, the short-sellers. Tell me I'm carrying water for them. Allege I'm on their payrolls. Charge me with collusion. I've heard it all before, during the nearly dozen years I've openly identified short-sellers as
sources for my daily financial column. I've heard the shorts referred to as immoral, unethical, and even un-American, and by quoting them I've been lumped by some investors into the same category.

Still, I've never backed away from tapping into the short-selling pipeline, because from what I've seen, it is the short-sellers who really wear the white hats on Wall Street. Who do you think gave me the early heads up to the troubles at dozens of companies--including Sunbeam, Boston Chicken, Snapple, and Planet Hollywood--long
before their stories, and stocks, unraveled? (Investors who heeded those warnings saved themselves a bundle.) Where do you think my competitors get most of their ideas for stories about companies that are up to no good? (Hint: Chances are, they didn't get
them from Securities and Exchange Commission documents.) And where do you think the SEC gets the first round of research for many of its cases?

Going short means borrowing shares, then immediately selling them with the hope, if all goes according to plan, of buying them back later at a lower price. As a cross between private detectives and forensic accountants, short-sellers make their living ferreting out
fraud, debunking hype, and spotting businesses that are about to turn bad. "Shorts serve as a check on excessive promotion," says Mike Long of Rockbridge Partners, who tracks their performance. It was a rough business throughout much of the bull market, when momentum investors bought some stocks merely because they were going up, but that kind of behavior created opportunities for the short-sellers. "These companies have one characteristic in common," says money manager Doug Kass of Kass Partners, who has taught a course on short-selling at Yale University. "At the height of their short interest, the momentum itself is created by the strength of the bull, which carried these
stocks to ludicrous levels."

Yet nobody, and I mean nobody, wants someone coming along and telling him his stock will soon be worth a lot less than it is today--not even if there's a truckload of evidence.
Several years ago, when he was putting out bearish reports at a small investment firm in Florida, Kass was denounced by analysts at the big investment banks for issuing a "sell" recommendation on casino stocks when, as it turned out, they were at their peak.
Similarly, Mike Harrold of Avalon Research didn't make friends last February when he issued a short-selling report on Ciena. He warned that competition could put pressure on Ciena's earnings. Investors and other analysts ignored him, and the stock continued to rise another 50%, thanks to a takeover offer from Tellabs. But that deal fell apart, and the stock has lost 90% of its value. "Every issue we brought up six months ago came true," says Avalon's Alan Jacobs.

That's not unusual, nor is it surprising. There's little argument that the shorts do some of Wall Street's best research. "You develop a certain discipline," says Jacobs. "Some things just don't make sense." And because shorts often put their own money at stake,
they tend to dig deeper for details. For example, some years ago several firms shorted U.S. Surgical, in part because of a switch by hospitals from disposable equipment--like the products made by U.S. Surgical--to reusables. To prove it, "we made 1,100 telephone calls to operating room nurses, purchasing organizations, and hospital
administrators," says Jacobs. U.S. Surgical, which peaked at 100, tumbled to less than 20 two years later.

Inevitably, many companies blame the shorts, and some even wage public battles. The classic was CML Group, a favorite of shorts several years ago. During a panel discussion at a Montgomery Securities investment conference in the mid-1990s, Chairman Charles Leighton suggested in front of the entire room that all of the money
managers in attendance gather later in the back room and squeeze the shorts. CML's stock was at its peak of around 30 at the time; it now trades for pennies.

I rest my case.

HERB GREENBERG is senior columnist for The Street.com. His E-mail address is herb@thestreet.com.

GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOFEST, [Cartoon drawing of Superman]

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: October 7, 1998




To: Janice Shell who wrote (9250)10/23/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: Just My Opinion  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 26163
 
Janice: I don't know about IOM, but I HAD heard that Cabot had called for their certs on PRST.
This was, as you said not done with the public's participation.
It was unilateral, I believe.

The squeezes generally don't work as you say, but IMO not because of your anti-cert calling perspective.

The BB squeezes do not work because of the people involved.
They usually never have the money behind them, and they are usually giddy over a small gain.

It's kind of hard to pull off a squeeze
when you have people that are happy making 1800 dollars. (for example)

(also the companies on these BB stocks are almost always foolish in their short term perspective, they generally kill it by issuing shares)

I believe that on the BTIM squeeze, the fact that Individual Investor Magazine had picked it as one of their Hot 25 helped that one tremendously.

The Zona one had a lot of brokers interested because of Perot.
When he sold 80,000 shares at 15, I think it was,
they all were scrambling to figure out what was going on.

This issue can go round and round, and I believe personally with the right "artillary" a squeeze can be pulled off.
However, I also don't put much faith in what I read on the boards concerning a specific BB squeeze, because I don't personally know the people involved.