Remember the CNBC Asia reporter Sri–who has little to no financial background, he was a theater major LOL–who naively recommended the pump and dump CNOA and used paid-for stock promotion as his research?
(Not enough people know how incredibly superficial/dangerous/useless CNBC is…EXACTLY like defunct Trader Monthly, but their losses on CNOA tanking from $2 to pennies helped them better understand)…
Well now CNBC’s pharmaceuticals “expert” Mike Huckman is the latest CNBC entertainer to fall for blatant penny stock hype. You see his official bio with airbrushed photo (seriously, what a little bitch!) tells us quite a bit:
Mike Huckman is CNBC’s Pharmaceuticals Reporter covering the drug, biotechnology and medical device industries. Huckman is based at the network’s global headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Huckman joined CNBC in September 2000 after nine years at WXYZ-TV in Detroit where he was one of the station’s lead reporters. Prior to WXYZ-TV, he served as a general assignment reporter at KGUN-TV in Tucson, Ariz., KBCI-TV in Boise, Idaho, and as an anchor/producer for the Montana Television Network.
Huckman has won numerous awards for his reporting, including three Michigan News Emmys, one for Business and Financial reporting, as well as a first place News Series Award from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters.
Huckman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Southern California.
The good news he isn’t like Sri and a theater major, the bad news–the guy knows exactly squat about penny stock hype/manipulation and his lack of experience just cost viewers MILLIONS considering he was the one who featured and promoted, alongside a “newsletter” that has one of the worst reputations around, ARNA, the magic fat pill penny stock whose stock, for some reason, was only at $4 before the CNBC/Stansberry promoting, which then surged to $7ish thanks to the promotion and just tanked 30% yesterday after their fat pill turned out to do exactly what most failing biotech penny stocks do, fail!
Oh yeah, I did a whole detailed post on the manipulative situation yesterday, but now I wanna feature Huckman’s article blaming ARNA for being unprofessional when IT’S ENTIRELY HIS FAULT.
I gotta copy and post the whole thing because this guy is totally at fault here, like Sri, and yet he can’t cop up to GETTING PLAYED LIKE THE INEXPERIENCED AIRBRUSHED DANGEROUS FIDDLE THAT HE IS:
There is no quid pro quo in my line of work.
At least there shouldn’t be. But when you do two stories on CNBC and another one on “TODAY” that mentions a company’s drug and profiles a patient who appears to have been a “responder” in one of its clinical trials you expect a certain basic professional level of cooperation and assistance.
It gets back to the building and maintaining of relationships that I blogged about last week. In the case of Arena Pharmaceuticals [ARNA 3.23 -1.27 (-28.22%) ] today that didn’t happen. And I have to wonder whether the perceived strength or weakness of its data had anything to do with it.
ARNA shares are off the lows of the morning, but still down big on very heavy volume. The company says it met the threshhold criteria to win FDA approval of a diet drug, but analysts and investors apparently were hoping for bigger weight loss.
The company bizarrely scheduled a conference call for reporters at 7:30 a.m. ET today on its highly anticipated late-stage test results for its experimental diet drug. Conference calls, whether they’re for the news media or for analysts and investors, are almost always done after a company or organization issues a press release. That gives the recipients time to read and digest it.
Not ARNA.
It put out the press release as the media conference call was starting. No surprise then that there were no questions when the operator opened the call to reporters. I was the only one in the queue and I didn’t have a question, just a complaint over not having a chance to even read the press release before joining a conference call to talk about it.
The CEO, Jack Lief, replied by saying he’d pass along my comment to his investor relations people. Whatev. I can’t imagine that a company would ever give analysts no time to review their results before hosting a conference call. Why would that be considered acceptable for the media? At the time, I was driving to work and listening to the CC on my BlackBerry/phone, so I couldn’t, technologically speaking, multi-task and read the release at the same time.
Also, especially in this environment where little companies like Arena are running low on cash, it’s pretty common for CEOs to come straight on CNBC to discuss their data for so-called lead product candidates. And given the market’s reaction, you’d think Mr. Lief might want to defend or, frankly, try to “talk up” the results. He was invited to appear live with me today. A spokesperson told my producer, Ruth, he wouldn’t be doing any TV interviews today.
Huckman, you stupid little babe in the woods, how dare you blame a struggling little penny stock for your inability to do proper research.
Like your Asian brother Sri, you don’t understand the world of penny stocks (maybe CNBC should require you over-make-upped buffoons to watch my PennyStocking instructional DVDs so you don’t do something stupid like your wanna-be-a-serious-reporter instincts…
You should not only quit, you should publicly apologize to all the viewers who are obviously angrily emailing you for featuring this piece of crap company, blindly allowed the CEO to spin his manipulative web on national TV and inadvertently (or deliberately—tell me your not as dumb as you look and you got a % of the financing!) helped promote them so that they could raise $50 million (that fund probly isn’t too happy with you either!) last week…
These wannabe reporter fools make me sick–I love ‘em (as my TIMalert subscribers and I profited from your dumbass hype…although not as much as we should have (anytime I begin thinking an ANALyst or CNBC clown does ANY research whatsoever before featuring a company and might just be right….well, I too must become less gullible)) for the opportunities they create, but I hate ‘em for making me bust their sorry asses!
The dumbass even tweeted:
Amazed by fat trading volume in $ARNA 2day on weightloss drug data. Average: 2 million. 2day: 35 million.
Yes, Huckmanster, blowout volume like that happens time and again on this Supernovas…but you wouldn’t know because you don’t know technical analysis, you believe penny stock CEOs & you’re too busy getting fake tans and teeth whitener to have the time or talent to do your job the way it should be done.
Huckster, you are a dinosaur and you don’t even know it, you will not enjoy the coming years as your kind gradually become extinct…go report the weather or write for The Motley Fool, that way your ignorance won’t cost people their hard earned money.
Posted in Financial Media Circus, idiots