Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Janice Shell who wrote (19983)	2/24/1999 10:31:00 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 26163

Online Trader Gets Humbled After Ignoring His Own Rule By JOHN R. EMSHWILLER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Less than a year ago, Gary Swancey was riding high on the online stock-trading wave. Under the moniker Ga Bard (he comes from Georgia and writes poetry), Mr. Swancey had hundreds of people following his Internet stock postings. The 46-year-old former heating and air-conditioning contractor says he had at one point turned a $20,000 stake into some $500,000 worth of securities. He even did a stint of investor-relations work for a small company called Midland Inc. These days, Mr. Swancey has largely dropped off the Internet chat circuit. He says he has had to sell his 5,600-square-foot home, a rental property and his 1995 black pickup truck to pay off debts and raise cash. Almost all his money is tied up in Midland, whose shares -- which were listed on the OTC Bulletin Board, maintained by Nasdaq, for stocks that don't qualify for Nasdaq itself -- haven't traded since they were suspended in August by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has questioned Mr. Swancey and charged two former Midland officials with securities-law violations. An SEC official declines to comment. <snip> Mr. Swancey was "respected" and "known all over," says Mike Nichols, a former textile salesman from Clifton, N.J., who became such an Internet trading celebrity under the moniker Big Dog that he has started his own online investor-relations firm. <snip> For him, the stock was Dallas-based Midland. Mr. Swancey says he was attracted by the company's capital structure, which included preferred shares that were each convertible at attractive prices into 35 shares of common. As part of his research, he flew to Dallas to interview company officials. He started two stock-chat Web sites about Midland that attracted thousands of messages. "I could quote page numbers of the [company] filings with the SEC," says Mr. Swancey. <snip> Mr. Swancey says that while such turmoil gave him occasional pause, he kept buying stock. According to trading records he supplied, he still holds about 10,500 Midland preferred shares, bought at from $3 to $26 each, between late 1997 and mid-1998. <snip> But he offers cautious words to would-be Internet traders: "Trust no one." Anyone who wants to trade online, he adds, needs the right tools, knowledge and discipline. "It is a vicious, vicious arena," he says. Full story: interactive.wsj.com - Jeff