and the rich get richer...

[schmosef]

http://www.break.com/index/how_to_munipulate_stock_prices.html

[az]

That's the way it is. The stock market is so much more about perceived value, that is psychology, than it is about real value. Just look at the dotcom bubble of a few years ago, it's happening again (on a smaller scale) with Web 2.0 stuff. If I were buying stock, I wouldn't buy what I think are good companies, I would buy what I think the majority think (or better yet, what the majority will be thinking - so I buy cheap now and wait) are good companies, because as long as enough people think that, the value is going to rise.

[schmosef]

It's just amazing that a fund manager can manipulate the market so much. They are supposed to be doing the research to find the good companies, not faking their results.

[az]

But people are sheep. If one of their stock market heroes buys or recommends something, the stock goes up automatically, because they all want to get in as well. And because they do, stock rises, which makmes their hero's prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Brian Ellis]

Principle of the pump and dump spam scams. Someone buys a million shares of a junk company at, say, 0.01 each towards the end of trading. This will actually start a rise trend and the price might rise to, say, 0.012 at close. He then spams out that stock as a recommendation and lots of other idjuts buy in and the price rises to, say, 0.02 by the middle of the following day, as the availability of shares drops. He then places his million on the market, which starts to drop, but he makes a 50% profit on his $10k investment over one day. The other pigeons lose, of course. Nothing illegal, unless it is the spam, in some places.

[TransformX]

It's just amazing that a fund manager can manipulate the market so much. They are supposed to be doing the research to find the good companies, not faking their results.

Nope, they're supposed to make money for the investors.