Wealth Through Stupidity

Steve had always been told good things come in threes. Bad things too, for that matter. But especially good ones; his grandfather had always made sure he found three coins if he found one, even if the last was behind his ear.

This particular set of three, however, was unlike any other. It had begun with an unsolicited stock tip showing up in his e-mail from someone whose sales pitch needed some refinement. On the other hand, the guy had pretty much made lack of refinement his sales pitch, saying that he was too busy analyzing beta ratios to worry about slick marketing stuff. Judge me on my work, it had said. Steve had been about to toss it when he noticed the recommendation to buy COKE.

On its surface, not much of a recommendation, as it would be hard to think of a better known company with serious market saturation. What had caught Steve’s eye was that the recommendation was not to buy the soda company (which traded under the ticker symbol KO, he was reminded), but a minor bottler who recently had changed its name from something involving Coke and bottling to something else that conveniently omitted the bottling part and sounded a lot like Coca-Cola itself.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, Barnum or W.C. Fields or someone else had said. And this huckster was recommending a bet on stupidity, all right – the assumption that those American people would glom onto COKE, thinking it was Coca-Cola.

Steve remembered something about the stock of Tweeter, Inc. skyrocketing when Twitter was getting big, and an investment in COKE with money made from people buying the wrong stock was amusing. But he had thought no more about it; unsolicited internet offers, as Julius Caesar had noted, tended to have a fairly high percentage of scams. Two weeks passed without; the good thing count was still one.

Without his dog’s interference, the COKE advice might never again have crossed his mind and gone the way of offers to meet hot Russian women or threats that only Bitcoin payments could prevent the release of his darkest secrets to the internet. But Grendel had objected to his blue raspberry coke, or simply not noticed the obstacle preventing access to her stuffed hedgehog, and an over-zealous tail-wag had sent the surprisingly not-blue soda all over the floor. Assessing the wreckage gave Steve ample opportunity to ponder both the origin of blue raspberry-flavored Coke and to recall the intriguing stock advice.

Once he had cleaned up as much of the stickiness as practical, a quick check on the Zorro app showed that COKE’s price had risen by, Steve figured, 10 percent since he’d first learned of its existence. Not a bad return at all for a couple of weeks.

Still, this hadn’t been enough to get Steve to try to find the first email. But it was enough to make him remember when a second email came the next day from Charles Hunt, Mr. COKE himself. This time, Mr. Hunt had a new recommendation involving Nikola Motors. There was the traditional analysis of business stuff, or at least as much as could be pressed into a two paragraph e-mail, and then the note that, all business aside, this electric truck maker could be expected to thrive based on its name. After all, if a company using the last name of Tesla could grow to be the most valuable in the world, the first name of Mr. Tesla had to be a good thing as well.

Seriously? This guy really counts on people being stupid, Steve thought. A first recommendation based on people accidentally buying the wrong stock, and now a second because the company name was sort of linked to the wildly-successful Tesla. Still, it was probably an internet scam, and Julius Caesar hadn’t lasted two thousand years for nothing. Although…he scrolled down through the e-mail, and there was no sign of the expected request for money. The entire message consisted of the Nikola recommendation; there was not even a link to click for more information, a website to visit, or a number to call. Hunt just asked for his recommendation to be evaluated.

When the third e-mail popped up two weeks later, curiosity won out. Gramps had predicted it. This one recommended a form of cryptocurrency that sounded like a complete joke. Steve ignored the crypto-whatever and, instead, teed up Zorro to find out what Nikola had been up to. Zorro was an app for bare-bones investing designed to be idiot proof and as technical looking as Candy Crush – if you took only a quick look, you’d probably think it was some sort of poker app. Then he stopped – why do this? A trope of 21st century life was to be inherently skeptical of any online offer, and here he was getting sucked in by exactly that. And these scams were made to suck people in, and people got sucked in, or they wouldn’t keep proliferating.

Still, the COKE recommendation had been legit. Unless this Hunt guy was an insider somehow, he couldn’t have known that the stock would go up after he recommended it. And it had gone up. Would there be any harm in seeing how Nikola had fared? Even if it had gone up, there was no obligation to do anything other than marvel at how stupid people could be.

Sure enough, it had. Nearly five percent in two weeks. It had to be a scam…but how? Again, he’d had the recommendation weeks ago, and, as promised, it had gone up. Steve thought about what he had already lost - $5,000 into COKE and then Nikola would have become $6,000 in less than a month – and decided to research Charles Hunt.

He texted his ex-girlfriend Kacie, who had managed to land a job with a private equity firm and would know more than his two undergrad courses in economics would tell him. Steve was pretty sure that markets cleared when supply and demand were the same and that marginal cost was important to something, but that didn’t really make him feel confident picking stocks. Kacie should know, however, and they were on good enough terms that she’d tell him if he were about to do something stupid.

Of course, Google was also an option, and he could find nothing in a solid 30 minutes of searching to suggest that Hunt was anything but legit. Kacie hadn’t responded, and the third recommendation was just sitting there. Why not?

Ten minutes later, Steve was sure this was an elaborate joke. Hunt’s third recommendation, a cryptocurrency called DogCoin, was ridiculous. Google had revealed that DogCoin had been invented (if it even had been invented, as there was no such thing and could you really invent something that never came into being) as a joke by some guy trying to demonstrate how dumb cryptocurrencies were. No one paid any attention to it until noted gazillionaire Helios Jefferson had tweeted a picture of a Newfoundland surrounded by a bunch of quarters.

It hadn’t seemed to matter that Jefferson had not mentioned DogCoin, or that exactly no one had any evidence that Jefferson had even heard of some obscure cryptocurrency invented as a joke. A picture of an undeniable dog with some undeniable coins was enough, even though the official DogCoin mascot was some obscure Uzbek dog Steve had never heard of. Enough people jumped to the conclusion that Jefferson was bullish on DogCoin, and the price went up.

It hadn’t really had any other direction to go given that DogCoins were worthless and pre-tweet were pretty much that. Now they were a full two cents per coin, a trivial amount on the one hand but in essence printing money on the other since anyone with computer time could create a DogCoin. And this was Hunt’s next big thing.

The next day Kacie called. Steve asked about Hunt.

“Don’t know him” was the response at first. Once he had explained why he was asking, she quickly added “Steve, are you a complete moron?”

“Kac, I know all about internet scams. But this guy hasn’t asked for money. And his first two recommendations went through the roof.”

“Steve, you’re making me glad I broke up with you.”

“Not the way I remember it, for the record, but thanks for the confidence boost.”

Kacie paused. “Look, Steve, let me draw you a picture of a scam. I get 1,000 viable e-mail addresses and pick the name of a company at random. I send 500 of them a note saying the stock is overvalued and about to plummet, and the other 500 get a note saying the stock is about to take off.

Then I watch the price. If it goes up, I throw out those first 500 addresses. But the second 500 – “

“I know where you’re going.”

“You pick some other stock – call it Nikola – and send 250 of the 500 who think you can pick stocks a note saying that it’s going through the roof, and the other 250 get a forecast of doom. You wait until it has moved one way or the other, and go after the 250 for whom you got it right.”

“Kac, I got the point.”

“And if they are idiots, those 250 now think you are a genius because you have called two stocks in a row” Kacie finished, rather too triumphantly.

“Are you done?” Steve asked.

“Are you done should be the question” was her response.

“This is different,” said Steve, not entirely believing it himself. “This wasn’t some offhand recommendation. He explained why COKE and Nikola were going up, and, by the way, they did. And he’s not asking for any money. He’s not asking for anything.”

Kacie snorted. “Were you listening? I know it’s not a strength of yours, but literally anyone could send crap like that out. You can make up any reason you want that the stock will go up, because they only people you’ll ever be talking to again are the ones where you got it right.”

Steve went for a change of subject. “What do you know about DogCoin?”

“It’s a joke. At least, unlike certain other subjects we’ve been discussing, it says right up front it’s a joke. You might as well assign a value to grains of sand in the Mojave. And get a good laugh about it.”

“So you’re saying I should pass on this one.”

Kacie laughed. “Wow, you can listen. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

Steve hung up. No DogCoins. As easy as it was to get sucked in, not today.

However, his resolve crumbled rapidly when his phone woke him the next morning with a breaking news alert. He briefly considered tossing it across the room rather than be confronted with the latest celebrity breakup or political scandal, but came fully awake when he saw the word “DogCoin.”

Using typical reserved understatement, the alert trumpeted “END OF FINANCE AS WE KNOW IT” over the description of the DogCoin price doubling to four cents. A click revealed little more; quotes from casual investors about taking over the world and from finance professionals barely able to control their disdain.

Three for three. Whatever Kacie might think, Hunt had gotten it right again. If this was some sort of elaborate marketing scam where half the pigeons got good advice and half bad, Steve had gotten lucky. Or maybe it was unlucky. He tried to remember basic probability, and thought the odds of winning three times in a row were around 10 percent.

DogCoin had doubled. Without being asked, his brain did the math. $5,000 following Hunt’s three pieces of advice would now have been more than $12,000. Whether Kacie had hope for him or not, she couldn’t argue with that fact. And not only had DogCoin doubled, but it appeared to be the number one story in all of finance just now. Hunt had called it ahead of time.

Kacie’s scorn, however, kept gnawing at him. What if she was right? Hunt was some schemer who sent conflicting advice out to a ton of people and then made sure he followed up with the ones who had gotten the “good” advice. He had to admit that kind of scheme would explain Hunt’s seeming clairvoyance. Unfortunately, there was little choice but to wait and hope Hunt would keep sending winning picks.

His phone rang. Kacie. It didn’t take Hunt’s level of prescience to figure out why she was calling – after all, DogCoin was trending everywhere. And trending up.

“Hello, Kacie.”

“Steve, I’m going to text you a picture. Hang on.”

Moments later, a chirp from the phone announced the arrival of a text. When opened, it showed the historical price of DogCoin for the last six months. The graph looked like a dead person’s EKG up until the last month, when it started to look more like one of those rollercoasters Steve never wanted to go near again. Wild fluctuations occurred day to day, with no coherent pattern. Of course, given DogCoin’s current historical high of four cents, all of the fluctuations were in the range from pretty much zero to a whopping two cents.

“What do you see in that chart, Steve?” Kacie asked.

Steve couldn’t help himself. “A best-ever price that would have allowed some lucky investor to double their money overnight, had he only followed sage advice.”

“Steve! Look at the first week in April. On Monday your sage investor who bought in at 9AM could have doubled his money by 9:03. Of course, he would have been completely cleaned out by 9:09.”

“And then would have been back to where he started four minutes later,” Steve countered.

“And penniless by 9:30. Show me where in this chart the price went up and stayed up. I’ll save you the time. It hasn’t.”

“Thanks, Kacie. Is that all?”

“I knew it. You’re stupid enough to believe in this scam. Did I tell you I got a nice e-mail from a Nigerian Prince who has 4,000 pounds of gold he wants to share with me if I just send him $1,000 to get it out of an underwater vault guarded by a three-headed dog on the dark side of the moon?”

“Skepticism noted.”

“Do you realize that DogCoin has dropped 15 percent in value while we’ve been talking?”

“By my count, that means I’d be up 85 percent instead of 100.”

“Math was never your strongpoint. Then again, logic clearly isn’t either. OK, I tried. Just promise me you won’t send this guy any money yet.”

Steve hesitated. “I’m not planning on sending anyone any of my money. But I’m not going to lie to you – this guy’s success is intriguing. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said that an idea that wasn’t dangerous shouldn’t be called an idea at all?”

“If you want to take financial advice from a guy who died broke, be my guest. But go ahead and be intrigued - I guess that’s all I can hope for right now. You’ll still be able to pay the rent.” Kacie disappeared.

The entire conversation irritated Steve. But he wasn’t sure whether he was irritated because Kacie was still trying to tell him what to do – a big part of why he had broken up with her, thank you very much – or whether it was because some part of him knew she was right. Unable to come up with any other next step, he launched Zorro and was pointlessly gratified to see that DogCoin had recovered to four cents. Take that, Kacie.

That gratification dissipated rapidly, as did DogCoin’s hold on the elusive four cents. He closed Zorro and reopened his e-mail, scrolling to Hunt’s last message. He had never read past the DogCoin description, and, like the others, there was no evident way to follow up, no next step to take. But he of course could simply reply to the e-mail – he could think of no downside given that Hunt and his minions already had his e-mail and it wasn’t like he was going to include his social security number and bank account info.

However, it proved harder than he first thought to craft the message. His first three tries were resoundingly rejected by the spirit of Kacie sitting on his left shoulder who kept asking if he would rather phrase it “hello, I’m a moron, please take all of my money.” He finally settled on a single sentence asking for more information on Hunt’s operation and next steps even though spirit-Kacie instantly warned that the reply would no doubt contain malware-infected attachments turning control of his computer over to hostile agents. He pressed send before she could come up with another reason to tell him no.

No reply was forthcoming for the rest of the day. He imagined the scam offices where it had gone and everyone there having a good chuckle that some rube not only was hooked by their can’t-miss scheme but had even written to them asking for his money to be taken. Casting lots to see who’d get to haul this latest sheep to the slaughter.

He brushed Kacie off his shoulder and out of his mind and tried to focus on his latest project for work, designing a collection mechanism for the Turnpike Authority to use for scofflaws who ran electronic tolls. Which were themselves a scam. But that took him back to Hunt and his promises.

***

Steve had managed to make some progress on the project when Hunt replied. Steve took a deep breath and willed himself to keep an open mind before clicking on the e-mail. To his great relief it had no attachments and instead simply asked him for basic information to open an account. Hunt thanked him for reaching out, emphasized the confidence he had to find investments based on unconventional factor rather than purely quantitative analysis as so many of his competitors did, and stressed that there was no obligation and no request for funds. The unassuming message also told Steve that a fourth recommendation would be heading his way in thanks for his request. It did not say how.

Unconventional factors indeed – confusing ticker symbols, namesakes, and eccentric billionaire tweets would certainly qualify. He reread the message to make sure there was no information requested that wouldn’t be readily available to anyone with an internet connection and a few spare minutes. He paused for a few seconds but quickly realized that once having taken the step of writing to Hunt, there was absolutely nothing here to raise any concerns. He filled out and sent in the identifying information requested, pausing briefly to wonder why anyone bothered to ask for an address anymore in a digital society. It wasn’t as if Hunt was going to send him a recommendation through snail mail for something like DogCoin where the price could double in minutes.

He was therefore quite surprised to find a small black notebook sitting outside his door when he went to take Grendel out the next morning.

***

He stared at the notebook. From Hunt? No other possibility sprang to mind. Outside of delivery guys, no one else had any business on his front porch, and he hadn’t had any deliveries in the last few days. Given Grendel’s expansive definition of heeding nature’s call, he was out that door roughly 35 times per day, or at least it seemed that way. And he doubted that the DoorDash guy was tracking his deliveries by hand in a black notebook.

Grendel started objecting to his inactivity, and Steve left the notebook where it was and started walking her, although given her level of obedience it was debatable who was walking whom. As usual, she insisted on relieving herself on his neighbor Arthur’s lawn, a practice that Steve had tried to curb given Arthur’s obsession with his lawn and propensity for keeping a close watch for a wayward twig (many of which he carefully gathered up and returned under a tree on Steve’s property). Arthur’s door opened and Steve tried to casually relocate himself and his peeing Labrador away from the manicured green before Arthur picked his head up. He wasn’t sure he had moved 70 canine pounds quickly enough and feared a lecture when Arthur spoke up.

“Good morning.”

An inoffensive enough beginning. “Good morning, Arthur.”

“Cold this morning.” This was the usual level of their conversation, a consequence of Arthur’s heavy Greek accent and Steve’s guilt over Grendel’s indiscretions.

“Sure is.” This was all Steve could come up with, and neither seemed to have anything to add to that statement of the obvious. Some people were quite comfortable with silence in conversation, but Steve was not. His mind raced for something to add when it occurred to him that Arthur could be of use.

“Arthur, did you see anything out of the ordinary this morning?”

“What do you mean?” countered Arthur, instantly suspicious.

Steve remembered interrogations from the too-many true crime shows he had watched. Rule number one was not to ask leading questions or you risked manipulating the witness into giving the answer you wanted. Or maybe that was rule number two. Rule number one might have been not to take a five minute pause before answering a simple question lest you make the witness think you were trying to conceal the customers for the basement meth lab.

Keep lies simple, Steve remembered. That might have been Sherlock Holmes. “I heard about some packages disappearing from porches. See anyone hanging around?”

“We have porch pirates in this neighborhood?” said Arthur, apparently ready to implement a neighborhood watch program that would waterboard the perpetrator of such heinous crime.

“Uh, not sure, it could just be someone’s delivery wasn’t made.”

“Who was it?” Arthur demanded.

This was not where Steve wanted the conversation to go. Luckily, the truth, of a sort, would work.

“Not sure. You know how people are, just say stuff, no details…”

“Who was it?” Arthur insisted.

“Well, did you see something?” Steve shot back. Two could play this game.

Arthur did not appear pleased that Steve had avoided his question, but eventually allowed that no one had been near his property nor had he seen anyone near Steve’s, although he thought there had been a slow-moving car passing by. Surprisingly, he had failed to get the make, model, and license plate, or so Steve gleaned from the heavily accented response. He extricated himself from the conversation as soon as he could, which wasn’t very hard given Arthur’s fear and dislike of Grendel, and moved on.

Unsurprisingly, the black notebook still loomed on the porch when he got home. Grendel sniffed quickly and moved on, apparently unimpressed. Steve admonished himself for acting like the notebook had been sprinkled with anthrax, scooped it up, and went inside.

If he had been expecting a genie to emerge with three stock picks or even a careful writeup of the services Hunt could provide, he was sorely disappointed. The notebook, quite handsomely appointed, contained just two strings of numbers. The first was too short to be a telephone number, while the other was a longer string of digits which upon closer inspection contained letters and numbers. He couldn’t shake the notion that there was something vaguely familiar.

He leafed through the remaining pages, finding nothing there. What the hell? Someone had taken the time and risked Arthur’s security apparatus to leave this? A bad joke? Kacie playing with him given that she knew the backstory? An unrelated prank? But what kind of prank would have an inscrutable riddle and nothing else?

Grendel had no helpful advice to offer, so he went back inside and tossed the notebook aside. Midway through his morning shower, an idea came to him. He finished as quickly as he could, brushed for far less time than recommended, threw on what passed for work attire when you work at home, and returned to his computer. Sure enough, an e-mail from Hunt consisting of a single word: Zorro.

Of course. The two strings in the notebook – an account number and a password. He opened Zorro, closed out of his account, and logged in using the codes in the notebook. It showed him an account which already held an entry for 100 shares of HaltNPlay, although the account was listed as “conditional.” Steve used Zorro to dabble a little, buying here and there, doing OK, but had no idea what a conditional account might be.

As it seemed to be his conditional account and seemed also to be worth $1000 given HaltNPlay’s $10.03 trading price, he tried to sell. If Hunt wanted to give him $1000, he’d take it. But he stopped before executing the trade; he could almost hear Kacie, horrified, warning him about what he might be obligating himself to if he took the cash. Or maybe that was the scam – if he sold he’d have to give the account some sort of payment information.

Unsure what to do, Steve looked away from the phone to see another e-mail had arrived. Opening it, he read:

As you know, you now have ownership of a Zorro account holding 100 shares of HaltNPlay. This is the recommendation I promised you – while there are many reasons to be bullish on this stock (the fundamentals are covered below), we believe that it is likely to substantially increase in price in a matter of days. This expectation is based on an anticipated run to the stock by small retail investors, individuals such as yourself. The subreddit below will give you some idea of the chatter about the stock, but momentum is building and there is money to be made.

You may have noticed that your Zorro account is designated as conditional. There is one simple condition to fulfill that will remove that designation and give you unrestricted ownership of the shares therein. Use the account to buy 10 shares of HaltNPlay. If you do so tomorrow, May 6th, precisely 15 minutes after your trade goes through, you will find you have 110 shares to do with as you please. We strongly recommend you hold them – we have every expectation that the shares will far exceed their current $9 price.

You are of course free to buy more than 10 shares and we advise you to do so – however, we understand that we are still in the process of proving ourselves to you and therefore are demonstrating our conviction in our methods by putting our money on the table by giving you these shares. Whether or not you choose to do so, we hope this guaranteed profit will convince you to work with us in future.

While there was more to the message discussing P/E ratios and same-store sales and the like, Steve didn’t absorb much of it. This was crazy confidence – Hunt was paying people $1000 up front with no obligation to become a customer. And Hunt’s reference to $9 a share hadn’t gone unnoticed, given that HaltNPlay was now at $10 – nope, Zorro told him now $10.12 per share. All on top of the impressive track record leading up to DogCoin.

What was the downside? The only condition was that he buy 10 shares and hold them for 15 minutes. Presuming he could verify with Zorro (not Hunt) that things really would work this way, the only way he could lose would be if the stock pretty much went to zero in 15 minutes. He pulled up the HaltNPlay stock price chart and saw a stock that, until recently, had moved very little in the past six months, mostly in the $4 range. A Google search revealed few analyst reports available on the stock, which Steve knew to be a brick and mortar retailer of merchandise related to games of all types from board games to VR equipment. Its price was low given the general lack of optimism about brick and mortar retailers, but it had held onto its price and wasn’t losing money. It sure didn’t look like the type of stock to have a DogCoin-like rise, but if it went nowhere Steve would still be up $1000. In 15 minutes.

A call to Zorro’s surprisingly helpful customer service line confirmed the account was real and the shares would be his when the stated condition was met. Steve quickly ran out of different ways to ask “so I can sell these whenever I want and cash out” and even verified that he could transfer the shares to his existing account rather than give Hunt’s account any payment information. Reddit confirmed that people were talking about this unremarkable stock, and Zorro that it continued up.

Now $10.20 per share.

The question of whether to buy now rather than wait for tomorrow popped into his mind. He had to buy 10 shares tomorrow to release the condition, but there was no reason he couldn’t buy more now. And on his account.

Steve did not have a lot of discretionary capital for investing. He did have a fair amount of student loans to pay off given that his undergrad degree specializing in Byzantine history hadn’t seemed to position him well for lucrative employment. The offer seemed so tempting, but he needed to be sure. He texted Kacie and set up a call for 8:50 the next morning, 10 minutes before the market opened and closed Zorro.

***

By 8:55 he had explained the situation and withstood the first barrage of reasons why he’d be an idiot to go through with it.

“This is a Ponzi scheme. He buys shares to create some upward momentum – after all, this is a stock that goes nowhere so he creates some demand and then gets a bunch of dolts to go buy even more. That drives the price up more. In all likelihood, the dolts get excited and drive the price up further. “

“Kacie, there’s no harm done. All the dolts in your story are making money, plus they started up $1000.”

“Steve! Let’s remember the previous recommendations this guy made. They all bet on people being stupid. They all paid off. How many of these dolts are going to jump out at exactly the 15 minute mark and pat themselves on the back for a job well done?”

“If they don’t, it will be because the stock is going up. They can get out whenever.”

“They can. In theory. In your basic Ponzi scheme investors can cash out too. People pay $100 to get into the scheme. If you are the first guy in and I’m second, Mr. Ponzi can take $50 out of my $100 and give it to you and pocket the other $50. You’re thrilled. I will be too, as long as there’s a third guy in. I may be so thrilled that I tell Ponzi to take my $50 and reinvest it. It’s all great until we run out of new guys.”

“Yeah, but in a Ponzi scheme people have to get their money back from Ponzi himself, and he’s off on a Caribbean island with no extradition treaty. Here it’s a stock, a publicly traded stock.”

Kacie sighed. “I agree, the offer as stated will almost certainly make you money. But Hunt is up to something here. He’s earned your confidence, and that of a bunch of other people with his DogCoin crap. You can bet he’s holding a bunch of shares in HaltNPlay, and you can bet he’ll be unloading them before you. And when he unloads a bunch, what do you think is going to happen to the price?”

“I’ll sell, Kacie. I’m not going to wait for the fall. OK?”

“Do what you want, Steve.” And she was gone.

It was 9:00. HaltNPlay had reached $10.30. If he was going to do this, now was the time. Even under Kacie’s pump-and-dump notion, buying early was the way to go – you wanted to be the first guy who joined the Ponzi scheme.

$10.32.

There really was no downside.

$10.40.

COKE. Nikola.

$10.43.

DogCoin.

$10.52.

Kacie. Student Loans.

$10.59.

Steve bought. OK, he had risked an extra few bucks by waiting, but that had enabled him to see it was heading up. And it had been $9 two days ago.

Zorro returned a notification that his trade had been accepted at a price of $10.78. What?

$10.89.

And he was already nearly five minutes into the 15 minutes he had to wait before selling.

$11.03.

The subreddit Hunt had given him was exploding with exhortations to buy more. Among the memes were references to “screw 15 minutes” and “rocket to the moon.” One user who went by the interesting handle of Yelling Yak urged everyone to have “diamond hands.”

$13.39.

How much money did he have available? Steve didn’t have a lot of savings, but this thing had now gone up 30 percent in eight minutes. Yelling Yak was messaging about the power of the people and kicking Wall Street’s ass. This was easy money.

$15.04.

Steve queued up $5,000 he had in his rainy day fund. Had he bought at 9 o’clock, it would be $7,500 now. He bought. “Diamond hands,” he discovered, were hands of people who held onto stock even when it could be sold for a profit. Those with diamond hands were revered on Reddit.

$23.43.

How much else did he have? Another few thousand for next month’s rent and various loan payments. Zorro told him his last trade had cleared at $31.29 a share. And its news section was starting to be dominated by HaltNPlay and its incredible rise. Even under Kacie’s view, this would just cause the stock to go still higher. The Yak certainly thought so.

$51.05.

Zorro helpfully messaged that he was eligible to buy on margin, meaning that to spend $100 he only had to deposit another $50 and could borrow the rest at reasonable rates. He transferred all his available cash into Zorro. And bought. The trade cleared at $174.62 a share.

If possible, the Yak was even more excited now. Steve wasn’t far behind, but still registered that it was now 9:15 and Hunt’s trading blackout had expired.

$201.03.

The 100 shares Hunt had given him were now worth $20,000. $20,000. He remembered his promise to Kacie. Well, not really a promise. And certainly their conversation had not involved this much money. He should sell – relatively speaking, he had amassed a fortune in 15 minutes and could kiss his student loans goodbye. He tried to do the math on what his HaltNPlay position was worth now, but gave up. Too hard to nail down the rapidly fluctuating price and exactly what he had borrowed. But being given $20,000 gave one quite a bit of a cushion.

$210.19.

It was all free money. Diamond hands.

THE END