Sunday
Feb032013
BUBBLE FLASHBACK - E*Trade Super Bowl Commercial
'Money coming out the wazoo.'
The height of the internet bubble, late January 2000. Here's a taste of the insanity of the times:
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From last year:
Clint Eastwood's Chrysler Super Bowl Commercial: "It's Halftime in America"
Though all of the youtube versions have been pulled, we found this copy from SPIKE TV. In case you were wondering, Chrysler still owes $1.5 billion to taxpayers:
Feb 3, 2013 at 5:24 PM
Reader Comments (5)
In late 1999, all the guys I worked with were pumping every spare dime they had into the market, especially tech stocks. Not having a clue how to short stocks, I put all my savings into a jumbo CD at 7.1% for 3 years and let them laugh at me for being such a luddite. You can guess who was laughing in 2002. DB? You can brag if you want. It's all in good fun and we know you'd never do it without being talked into it ;-) What was your favorite short of all time?
My fav story was shorting Redback Networks in 1999 - they announced a huge secondary that would allow insiders to dump millions of shares, but instead of going down, the stock rallied because Cramer was long Redback at his hedge fund and he had used 2 CNBC appearances that day to say how fucking great the secondary was because it meant that institutions would now be able to get into the company in size.
So I emailed CNBC reporter Tom Costello, (whom I had never communicated with before) with a long screed about how the secondary would DILUTE, and that cramer was a fucking monkey spouting garbage. And 15 minutes later, it was Costello's turn to report from the NAZ, and he immediately said 'I have this email just in from a fund manager' and he proceeded to read my email ripping Redback and (Cramer the monkey) word for word on the air for about 45 seconds.
I was very surprised to say the least.
Cramer was a fucking lunatic in those days, blatantly using CNBC to promote low-float internet stocks his hedge fund was holding. He did it EVERY fucking day. This was before Mary Meecker and Henry Blodgett got busted in their scandal. So CNBC wasn't paying any attention to conflicts of interest, and they let Cramer do whatever the fuck he wanted.
For what it's worth, within 3 years, Redback had fallen to below $5 after trading at least as high as $200.
And here's Ted David's Wikipedia. He was pushed out of CNBC in favor of hot chicks several years ago. He was a good reporter, a former EMT, and a high school teacher, not some blow-dried, pump-wearing pussy like Bill Griffith.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_David