Can you imagine how much the shareholders of this company would have been making as the stock was going up? I mean, there's only $1.3M of total shares on issue even now but for a company that was worthless just days ago, that's a great outcome for them.

I remember walking in with my dad one day when we were looking for a new TV (ours had just died). The guy working the floor directed us to a model that cost 30% less than what we were originally looking at, explaining (correctly) that it fit our needs much better.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2013/10/04/the-big...

It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading. Almost like misspelled domain names and ad networks.

It's not how auto trading works. Traded instrument ranges are preset before the algo is started. I've never heard of an algo that tries to pick stocks to trade dynamically based on a name, it would be astoundingly risky.

That's OK. It doesn't have to exist for it to be interesting to me. Think of it more like an interesting extrapolation of a scifi story, if you want. HFT advantages become slim enough to warrant dynamic instrument selection based on twitter sentiment analysis. So, you get bad algorithms following imperfect people, who execute millions of trades to fast to watch. And, someone trying to take advantage of that would act like a domain squatter, taking stake in a penny stock, predicting the next misspelling and correction.

A few dozen people screw up and the bots see a stock go from worthless to hot in a short period of time and jump on board.

For financial crimes? Surely you're joking.

Obviously people can always sell stuff outside the public markets.