At first I had good days and bad, mostly bad. My instincts were good, but sometimes I got too cute, tried to hold onto positions to make big scores, when I knew I should’ve been conservative and gotten out. Though I never held positions overnight, so I didn’t get burned after 9/11. Actually, the market volatility after the attacks worked out great for me and I made big money on the swings up and down. I made more money going short than going long, and seemed to have a knack for spotting the stocks that were in deep shit. One day I decided to stop going long altogether and only sell short. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’d ever made.
I was a natural short seller. It fit my personality, I guess — I was good at spotting the bad in things. I knew when a stock was going to tank before any jackass analyst did, and I knew how to profit from the situation. And with all the Internet crapola out there, spotting trouble wasn’t exactly a chore. Net stocks were still trading at astronomical prices and I rode the suckers all the way down to bankruptcy. Some of the companies were such obvious losers that I broke my rules about not holding positions overnight and went short long-term. I wasn’t an idiot — I covered with options so I couldn’t get burned on the upside, but that rarely happened. It seemed like there were an endless number of dotcraps going belly-up and an endless number of opportunities to cash in.
In early 2002, when Bush and his boys were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, I made my first million. But at that point I didn’t really care about the money. It was all about the action, about being right. Although I could’ve afforded some-place bigger, I stayed in my one-bedroom in Hoboken. I almost never went out; what was the point? The things I gave a shit about were the stock market and making money. I saw my friends less and less and I’d never been much of a family guy. I used to have girlfriends. Nothing long-term or serious, but I was a good-looking guy and when I went out to a bar or a club I had no trouble meeting women. Like Silver’s wife. Sometimes I thought about calling her up and taking her out and trying to nail her just for the hell of it. I could’ve, but the truth was I wasn’t interested. Sex just didn’t do it for me anymore.
I spent more and more time online and less time sleeping. It got to the point where I was spending eighteen to twenty hours a day staring at my computer screen. If I wasn’t making trades or doing research I was posting on stock message boards. My comments were always negative, always designed to inflict maximum damage on the companies I was shorting. I attacked management, put negative spins on positive news, and even wrote outright lies — anything I could do to help crush stock prices. I posted under multiple names — partly because the board monitors on sites like Yahoo and Motley Fool kept kicking me off, and partly because I wanted to create the impression for newbies following stocks that there was massive negativity about the companies. Still, everyone eventually knew who I was. I guess my posts had a style to them or whatever, because I became one of the most well-known stock bashers on the Internet.
My favorite stock to bash, without a doubt, was Delivero. Part of it was personal. I wanted revenge. I wanted to take Silver down, for him to feel some of the pain I’d felt when he fired my ass. But I also truly believed that the company had despicable business practices and was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with Wall Street. Somehow the piece of shit had managed to stay in business through the height of the Internet bloodbath, though its stock had plummeted from a high of eighty-four to around six bucks a share. Even when I was working for them, I knew their business plan was smoke and mirrors.
They wanted to be a competitor of Kozmo.com, that other brilliant company that thought delivering Ben & Jerry’s and VHS movies by bicycle was the wave of the future. The problem was that Delivero had no real growth plan and they were burning cash. They’d had a few awful quarters where their numbers didn’t come close to analyst estimates. But every time the company was in dire straits they’d raise more money in a new stock offering or announce a new “partnership,” and somehow the shares managed to tread water, even go up. I’d post like crazy on those days, about how Silver and his cronies were criminals and deserved jail time, but the idiot longs would circle jerk themselves, going on about how Delivero’s stock was going to a hundred a share and how I was the world’s biggest moron.
It got to the point where I felt like I was the most hated man on the Internet, and the disgust toward me was probably the most glaring on the Delivero message boards. There was a lot of bad blood on those boards from suckers who had got-ten in when Delivero was in the stratosphere and were desperately waiting for the stock to go back up. Yeah, like that would ever happen. They ganged up on me, called me a loser, a retard, the village idiot — every name imaginable that could get through the web filters. A lot of the idiots started calling me a “paid basher” and claimed I’d been hired by hedge funds to bad-mouth stocks all day. One nutcase claimed he knew for a fact that I received five cents for every negative post I wrote. It amazed me how angry I could get these guys, but I liked it too. I knew that in order for me to make money as a short, I needed jackass longs on the other side of my trades, and I thanked God there was no shortage of fools among Delivero’s investors.
As the months went by, and it seemed like another Net stock/ex high flyer from the ’90s went under every day, Delivero somehow stayed in business. The company was like a cockroach that you stamp on ten times but still won’t die. It had to be a combination of luck and pure stupidity from the delusional longs living in fantasyland who continued to buy the company’s worthless shares — there was no other explanation. It was so obvious to me that Delivero wasn’t in the business to make money — they were in the business to deceive stockholders. The company expanded to other cities, made new partnerships, floated more stock, and issued other bullshit PR releases to make the stock price go up. Then insiders, especially Silver, sold at every possible opportunity. Dipshit longs claimed that the sales were planned, part of the execs’ normal retirement plans — yeah, right. They believed that, there was a bridge I would’ve liked to sell them. Every three months I listened to the webcast of Delivero’s quarterly results and got nauseous as Silver, in his pompous, know-it-all voice, fed his crap to gullible analysts. Some dork from Morgan Stanley or Citigroup would ask Silver why he was lowering estimates for the next fiscal year and he’d go on about “new strategies going forward” and “adapting to the current landscape,” never answering the question, of course. Did the analysts give a shit? No sirree. They had their own agendas, pumping up garbage stocks like Delivero with their Buy and Strong Buy ratings to keep their clients happy.
When the WorldCom scandal hit, I thought Delivero would go down the toilet too. I was so positive that the company was history that I got out of all of my other positions and shorted the shit out of the stock. It had been trading in a recent range of four to six dollars a share. I profited on the short-term moves downward and covered on options when the stock ticked up. And everything I made, I plowed back into my long-term short position. Every morning when I woke up, I went online and checked for news on Delivero. I knew that one day the Chapter Eleven announcement would appear. It was only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, since I had no other stocks in my portfolio, I was able to focus full-time on my bashing of Delivero. I tarted posting at least five hundred times a day on various message boards. I attacked the business model of the company and its deceitful accounting, but my messages also became more personal, more focused on Silver. I wrote about how incompetent he was and about how he had an alcohol and drug problem. I posted that he was into child porn, that he had ties to Al-Qaeda, that his trophy wife was a transvestite. I knew my posts came off as bizarre and irrational — that was the point. I wanted to incite rage, to stir the pot — and it worked like a charm. There was no end to the number of longs who got sucked in and started arguing with me. Their posts were even nuttier than mine. Wannabe investors would visit the Delivero message boards and see all of the wacky posts from the longs and get the impression that a bunch of lunatics were investing in the stock.