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by kristopolous 1935 days ago
or naked, amc, sunw, blackberry, none of them.

Not only but if you search reddit for these stock tickers you'll see very little other than the suspension notice. Take HLXW for instance - 1 mention in the past year. (https://old.reddit.com/search?q=HLXW&restrict_sr=&sort=relev...)

The exceptions to this are PTTN & BLSP, which both have some low vote count posts - but there's always some brigade trying to pump something on reddit, why not the 100 or so other tickers as well?

PTTN and BLSP for instance, is listed amongst 'IGEN HPST GRNF IPNFF VMNT RNWF SHMN ZNOG COUV VISM CBBT BRTX ISWH TSNP ENZC PUGE ATVK BRLL NECA OPTI GMEV TTCM PMPG TSPG OZSC FORW BLSP GTLL PTTN VPER AGGI CTLE BLDV NWTT PVDG UATG MICT RSSV PPBT AKBA DSGT GRCV NAKD ACB ALPP BLSP GM TRUP' in 2 posts, what about the others? - feel free to cross-compare the list btw, I did. Those are the only 2 crossovers. A direct link to the hype post: https://old.reddit.com/user/pennystockguyz/comments/lf8zhg/h...

The claim of 'the latest in a string of temporary trading halts amid volatile trading in so-called “meme stocks.”' needs more information. Does the SEC have some criteria that doesn't include reddit (for instance, some scammer paying for facebook ads to unsavvy investors claiming "HLXW is the next gamestop")?

The SEC in https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/2021/34-91213.pdf uses the words "certain social media accounts may be engaged in a coordinated attempt to artificially influence their share prices." alright, let's take it on good faith. It's not happening on reddit. Somewhere else maybe?

The only thing I can find is on twitter. The political class likes to pretend people care about twitter wayy more than they actually do. If you look for say, HLXW and let's just pick PTTN https://twitter.com/search?q=HLXW%20PTTN&src=typed_query&f=l... and scroll scroll scroll you'll see a few mentions, is that it? Things like this? https://twitter.com/AlexDelarge6553/status/13605979641719808... ... there's our IPWG, MRIB, BBDA and EVTI, we have 6 matches in that post. If this was a source, what about the others 16 in that list? Even if it's some incompetent DC person impressed by 24 retweets, it's still only a 27% crossover.

Is it this And weird trading patterns? Do they have some undisclosed tripwire model with conditions (say, some X trading pattern followed by some Y "influence metric" followed by some Z pattern?). And if this exists, shouldn't there be some disclosure so that innocent investors know what to avoid and when to divest? I always check reddit before I invest to make sure there's not some hypetrain bubble behind the security.

Also there's real people behind all these companies who, I assume, are just trying to do an honest job of overseeing waste management facilities or whatever these companies do. I'm sure they don't appreciate scammers playing around with their stock and getting it suspended and thus probably scaring off their actual investors.

Whatever it is, this isn't the full story.

3 comments

Fun fact: WSB bans discussion of penny/microcap stocks, which is why none of these tickers show up in that subreddit.
GME had a market cap below $1B between April and November 2020[0], and somehow DFV could still make his posts.

The rules didn't say that the limit was $1B in September,[2] that was only added later.[1]

[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/marke...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/about/rules

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200912192940/https://www.reddi...

This is a case of needing more explicit rules to enforce the intent of the ambiguous existing ones.

>any other worthless securities that are susceptible to scams or pump & dump schemes.

As for GME, Penny stock designation technically requires that the stock not trade on a major exchange. GME was never de-listed.

Penny stock designation has nothing to do with exchange listings, that’s OTC. Penny stock designation starts when the stock price is $5 or below.
GME however was a fallen titan.

Also, being a sub member since 2014 - pennystocks were always frowned upon.

I know for crypto back in 2015-2017 there were semi-private groups that would orchestrate P&D schemes for alt coins. I think "social media" is probably misused here as much if not more than "meme stock" - the internet just makes collusion that much easier.
No different nowadays. /biz/ runs endless P&D schemes.
They are still going strong. More of them even thanks to the wave of dumb money that flooded in recently.
Orchestrating in secrets, OK; but pumping in secret??
Not secret necessarily, just spamming only niche groups on telegram and discord, not publicly spamming. I believe they think this makes it less likely they get caught whilst still covering a lot of ground. For an analysis of these private telegram groups doing pumping, see the following paper. It has an index at the end listing all the private channels they used in their analysis

[0] https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~livshits/papers/tr/pump_and_dump_t...

Wow, really interesting, thanks for posting that.
In my Twitter feed a couple months ago, I saw a tweet (a promoted tweet? If they even have that and I’m remembering correctly) advertising a crypto “pumping group” on Discord. Yes, they actually referred to themselves as a “pumping group.”

Not so secret in terms of getting new members!

Did you check Tik Tok? Discord?
No. I spent enough time wearing the journalism hat today. I really have to get back to my actual job.

Tell me if you find anything

I was never going to bother because I don't have any conspiracy theories about this

If the SEC says there's strange social media activity, I'll take it at face value. They're the SEC and these are dead companies, not really unexpected they'd be halted at some point

I'm just pointing out that there are less discoverable places that are pumping stocks right now

Absolutely. I'm sure they aren't hiding anything. The results aren't what I expected so it's a learning opportunity for me