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Penny Stock Basics

Quepasa Corporation (QPSA) Represents

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Written by Timothy Sykes
Updated 4/16/2022 4 min read

Inevitably when you write an article that cuts through ALL the social media and hype bullshit with the actual ugly business numbers, people are gonna think you’e shorting the stock.

Nope.

I prefer shorting blatant penny stock pump and dumps like this.

But just like when I wrote honestly about the carcass penny stock Options Media Group Holdings, Inc. (OPMG), I am not short and I have no intention of shorting a stock that is mid-range…I simply get fed up when companies bend the truth and manipulate so as to give their stock price better odds of rising…and the saddest thing is management bullshit works…for a while.

Last time I wrote an in depth research report about QuePasa, I was exposing the fact that this “hot social media company”, pitching itself as “the Facebook of Latin America” had an astounding 96% of their revenues come their roughly 40% owner as he meticulously had them sign contracts promoting his steel company & Mexican/American lobbyist group…no joke.

They were only tests for the big real contracts later said longs.

None of the current revenues matters, only the fact that they keep signing up more and more people to the platform, promoter Ian Cassel said.

Wait til they introduce their social gaming, this is Zynga for Latinos, the gullible said.

Well QPSA dropped outlier-ly on a big bull day for the markets just a few days ago because several months after my initial expose and a 50% stock drop, their business is falling apart and they can’t hide their incompetence any longer as the numbers they gave during their presentation with analysts made everyone who understands anything about growth want to puke:

1) Pageviews declined from 230.9 million in May to 107 million in June (decline of 54%)
2) Monthly unique visitors declined from 16.3 million in May to 8.1 million in June (decline of 50%)
3) User base added 680k in May vs 1.9 million in June (decline of 64%)

The fact is Quepasa is nothing more than a giant spam machine, trying to get as many registered users as possible and then doing nothing for them but promoting junk in a manner reminiscent of banner ads which people learn to avoid over time.

To test out my theories, a little while back I signed up to Quepasa’s “service” as Jose Diminguez and all I got were some Playboy Mexico ads and lots of emails telling me to vacation in Mexico. (No thanks, stop trying to get everyone drunk and sunburnt and fix your contaminated water/crime rate/business practices if you want more people to visit.)

That kind of marketing is not the future of social media.

It’s not the future of the internet.

Because it’s not useful.

Developing a social game to justify their multi-hundred-million dollar marketcap does not excuse the fact that this business model sucks and all the hype surrounding QuePasa is utter bullshit.

I look forward to the day when more people wake up and the bigtime steel guy says enough of this internet crap and throws in the towel.

All I can say now is thank you to Quepasa, for your incompetence and misinformation has taught me valuable lessons as I develop infinitely smaller but infinitely more useful and greater potential longterm platforms like Profitly and Investimonials…which is why our traffic is not dropping 50%, it’s growing steadily and people are loving the new trading tools

It’s ironic that ProfiDing is fast on its way to having more REAL revenues than Quepasa…we don’t need some rich guy funding our operations, we provide a quality product that people need….that’s the future of the internet…too bad more stock market/trading websites learned this lesson rather than following Quepasa’s good-for-valuation-right-now flawed model.

This is what being useful is all about, apprende:

Que Pasa
Que Pasa


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Timothy Sykes

Tim Sykes is a penny stock trader and teacher who became a self-made millionaire by the age of 22 by trading $12,415 of bar mitzvah money. After becoming disenchanted with the hedge fund world, he established the Tim Sykes Trading Challenge to teach aspiring traders how to follow his trading strategies. He’s been featured in a variety of media outlets including CNN, Larry King, Steve Harvey, Forbes, Men’s Journal, and more. He’s also an active philanthropist and environmental activist, a co-founder of Karmagawa, and has donated millions of dollars to charity. Read More

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The available research on day trading suggests that most active traders lose money. Fees and overtrading are major contributors to these losses.

A 2000 study called “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors” evaluated 66,465 U.S. households that held stocks from 1991 to 1996. The households that traded most averaged an 11.4% annual return during a period where the overall market gained 17.9%. These lower returns were attributed to overconfidence.

A 2014 paper (revised 2019) titled “Learning Fast or Slow?” analyzed the complete transaction history of the Taiwan Stock Exchange between 1992 and 2006. It looked at the ongoing performance of day traders in this sample, and found that 97% of day traders can expect to lose money from trading, and more than 90% of all day trading volume can be traced to investors who predictably lose money. Additionally, it tied the behavior of gamblers and drivers who get more speeding tickets to overtrading, and cited studies showing that legalized gambling has an inverse effect on trading volume.

A 2019 research study (revised 2020) called “Day Trading for a Living?” observed 19,646 Brazilian futures contract traders who started day trading from 2013 to 2015, and recorded two years of their trading activity. The study authors found that 97% of traders with more than 300 days actively trading lost money, and only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage ($16 USD per day). They hypothesized that the greater returns shown in previous studies did not differentiate between frequent day traders and those who traded rarely, and that more frequent trading activity decreases the chance of profitability.

These studies show the wide variance of the available data on day trading profitability. One thing that seems clear from the research is that most day traders lose money .

Millionaire Media 66 W Flagler St. Ste. 900 Miami, FL 33130 United States (888) 878-3621 This is for information purposes only as Millionaire Media LLC nor Timothy Sykes is registered as a securities broker-dealer or an investment adviser. No information herein is intended as securities brokerage, investment, tax, accounting or legal advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation or sponsorship of any company, security or fund. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes cannot and does not assess, verify or guarantee the adequacy, accuracy or completeness of any information, the suitability or profitability of any particular investment, or the potential value of any investment or informational source. The reader bears responsibility for his/her own investment research and decisions, should seek the advice of a qualified securities professional before making any investment, and investigate and fully understand any and all risks before investing. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes in no way warrants the solvency, financial condition, or investment advisability of any of the securities mentioned in communications or websites. In addition, Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes accepts no liability whatsoever for any direct or consequential loss arising from any use of this information. This information is not intended to be used as the sole basis of any investment decision, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the investment needs of any particular investor. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.

Citations for Disclaimer

Barber, Brad M. and Odean, Terrance, Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. Available at SSRN: “Day Trading for a Living?”

Barber, Brad M. and Lee, Yi-Tsung and Liu, Yu-Jane and Odean, Terrance and Zhang, Ke, Learning Fast or Slow? (May 28, 2019). Forthcoming: Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=2535636”

Chague, Fernando and De-Losso, Rodrigo and Giovannetti, Bruno, Day Trading for a Living? (June 11, 2020). Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=3423101”