No joke, this is an email I got the other day, the name and ticker has been deleted to protect the guy from getting his ass beaten:

hi tim, i have been wondering about short selling penny stocks forever and to me it makes complete sense. i just came across an article “How To Short Sell Pumped Up Penny Stocks” on yahoo.com via tradingmarkets.com and came across your name.

this is what i had in mind…as this example is a public stock that a group of friends on mine started up

stocker ticker: XXXX
issued at 2 dollars a share on 9/05/2007
currently trades at 0.0006 (july 24 2007)

lets say i shorted 500 shares of this stock on 9/05/2007{1000 dollar initial investment)

For the next few days i decide to buy my stock(get out of it) at an average price of .0006 cents a share.

The question i have to ask for you, would my profit from beginning til now be roughly 3.3 million.

This is my reasoning. I sold 500 shares at 2 dollars and its now worth .0006 cents a share. It has lost a value of 3333 times its initial value (which is good for me because i shorted the stock). So i took that 3333 and multiplied it by my initial investment of 1k. Now is my logic correct and did i just make 3.3 million in this hypotheticl but real life scenerio?

Wow. WTF kind of f$%^&ed up up thinking is this? Does that mean you can make $6.6 million off a $2,000 investment? Screw it, maybe you wanna make $33 million off a $10,000 investment? Hell, why do we even need to stick to any mathematical rules whatsoever–you should be able to turn $1 into $1 billion through short selling penny stocks, right? Sure, why not!

When I say the world knows sooooooooooooo little about short selling, let alone short selling penny stocks, this is what I’m talking about. You cannot imagine how friggin confused/uneducated/dumb people there are–it’s not all their fault–much of it is due to the trading “teachers”/”coaches” being uniformly fraudulent/incompetent and the fact that some people just aren’t meant to have any money whatsoever.

People please get my PennyStocking DVD package, it’s been known to prevent cases like the one listed above.

For the record, in order to calculate one’s short selling profits, you take entry price (the price at which you short sell your shares) minus your exit price (the price at which you buy to cover) multiplied by the number of shares you have…so in this case, it’d be $2 – $.0006 x 500 shares = $999.70 and then you pay some commissions. It’s a great little strategy, but it’ll take lots of pumps and dumps to turn a few thousand into a few million…