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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Bid.com International (BIDS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mccowaner who wrote (21191)	4/15/1999 8:54:00 PM
From: Thomas Kirwin	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 37507

Heed this Warning! Chat 'n Chewed Up: A PairGain Parable By Gregg Wirth and Kevin Petrie Staff Reporter 4/15/99 6:41 PM ET When money manager Charlie Smith saw the spike in PairGain Technologies' (PAIR:Nasdaq) stock, he didn't go to Bloomberg or Dow Jones in search of information. He went to Silicon Investor. "I have PairGain's thread on Silicon Investor bookmarked," says Smith, who runs money for Pittsburgh-based Fort Pitt Capital. It was early in the trading day on April 7. At the other end of Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, James Cooper turned on his PC shortly before trading began and visited the same SI thread for a routine check of the daily chatter. Cooper likes to comb messages for what he calls "contrarian indicators." Often, when messages grow too enthusiastic he sells. Just after trading began, Cooper spotted a link to what purported to be a Bloomberg story. He clicked through and found the piece. Minutes later and more than a thousand miles away in Lawrence, Kan., George Roberts, a local landlord and sporadic online trader, was weighing a decision over his breakfast, a cup of coffee. He had seen the PairGain news during a routine morning run through the SI boards. Now, Roberts was trying to decide whether to add to his 500-share position. At first glance, he had no reason to doubt the buyout news. Then he noticed the stock wasn't rising as quickly as one would expect on a takeover bid. He reassured himself, he says, by looking at the stock's heavy volume. "I figured with this volume, this couldn't have been just message board nonsense," he says. Indeed, it was more than message board nonsense. It was a fake. The report that PairGain was being acquired by Israel's ECI Telecom (ECILF:Nasdaq ADR) was fake. The purported Bloomberg story was fake. The site it linked to that looked like Bloomberg's site was fake. One Canadian investor who would disclose only his Net handle, "Peppe," bought and sold 4,000 shares into the fake reports. He turned a $3,000 profit on a 20-minute investment. And he wouldn't hesitate to do it again: "If I knew [stock news] was wrong and the stock was still going up, I'd trade it." thestreet.com