Up to Morgan's scary business models
The name of the company is SpeculateHere.com. The company is privately owned by a large number of owner/speculators, has no tangible product or revenues, and its sole stated goal is to encourage speculation in its stock for the purpose of running up the stock price. Keeping the company privately held will make shorting virtually impossible, eliminating those annoying bear raids.
The company business plan is as follows: each owner/speculator purchases 100 original shares, which the company will never repurchase. (All funds raised in this manner will be used to aggressively market the stock to locate additional buyers to run up the stock price.) Additional purchases may be sold back to the company at any time; at the company's web site, any owner/speculator who has purchased his 100 original shares may buy or sell any number of shares at an offer or bid price which the company maintains in real time. The company intends to keep the bid-ask spread around .0001 times the share price, far below the bid-ask spread on conventional public stocks. When a new share is issued or an old share is bought back, the number of outstanding shares in the company changes accordingly. Also at its web site, the company offers up-to-the-minute tick data which has been fully cleaned. Free, of course. This will be especially useful for those short-term technical traders who wish to speculate using Elliott waves, Japanese candlesticks, phases of the moon, etc.
Consider the advantages:
It's a speculator's dream! Best of all, we will be helping the worldwide economy as speculators will stop causing dangerous contortions in the price of Dollar/Yen in favor of trading this wholesome, harmless product. To drive this point home, SpeculateHere.com's home page will include a real-time ticker of the total losses of all speculators in the system to date and a "bankrupt of the day" feature.
During its first year of operation, speculatehere.com expects to attract 50 million owner/speculators who will have paid an average of $50/share for each of their original 100 shares, which are now worth $100/share, for a paper profit of $250 billion on these 5 billion original shares. Due to additional purchases, the total number of outstanding shares will be 30 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $1 trillion, about half the U.S. GNP. With our aggressive marketing strategies, we expect to attract enough additional demand for the stock to push up its price by 40% a year for the next 20 years. We are especially optimistic about our growth prospects in Japan, as we hear that Japanese investors are eager to speculate in those hot new American Internet stocks. Our long-term goal is to attract 50% of the trading volume of all securities traded worldwide: we feel that our capability to offer a modular speculative product around the globe with the simple click of a button uniquely positions us to meet the needs of the sophisticated modern investor.
Should investors prove unwilling to invest in the company – perhaps because of a change in market sentiment towards Internet stocks – SpeculateHere.com will reformulate itself as a game site for day traders and give the initial billion dollars worth of "stock" to selected day traders, redeemable for Internet scrip from beenz.com. The company will also provide a free service to help speculators track the performance of their SpeculateHere.com stock against other Internet stocks. Revenues will come from the bid-ask spread, advertising,. and placement charges on testimonials for technical trading schemes.
I wish I'd thought of this myself, but SpeculateHere.com was created by a friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. If you want to help SpeculateHere.com get off the ground, please contact me and I'll get you in touch with my friend. SpeculateHere.com is currently seeking venture capital and also seasoned executives who are willing to relocate to a small Caribbean island.
December, 1999
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