Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat's commentary for the week of April 24, 2012?

Article Excerpt

This past week, the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) said that twin brothers, Alexander and Thomas Hunter, have been scamming stock-market investors for four years, starting at age 16. By age 20, they had amassed $3 million in profits between them. Stock-market fraudsters used to be a lot older. But thanks to technological advances, kids today can do everything that old-time Canadian penny mining stock swindlers could do, at much lower cost and at an earlier age, without revealing their youth. It’s a little like creating video games or setting up social media sites. In the old days, promoters would frequent financial-district barrooms where they could meet with unscrupulous stock brokers. For a fee, these brokers were willing to sell the promoters’ stocks to their most gullible clients. The promoters would also pay stock-market newsletters to tout their stocks to the public. All this would have required substantial financing, plus a number of suave and mature confederates or “front men”…