Penny stocks are nothing but a roulette wheel. It is pure gambling. I compare it to when people do the NCAA March Madness brackets and someone picks every game correctly. That person just got lucky. Of course you can string together a bunch of doubles with penny stocks.. but for every person who gets 3 doubles correct in a row, there are 63 other people who lost everything.
Seems like your classic pump and dump tactic. "Well if you invest in these stocks right now!" ..and then they sell their 25% of the company and you go bust. Sure you do have the opportunity to make a lot of money from penny stocks, but claims like these are all too often just marketing schemes.
Anything sounds this great is a scam most of the time. I am not saying this can't happen but I feel like the media blows up everything. This should be a story of scam.
The kid is quoted as saying that he didn't want any "publicity" surrounding the case which makes me think the whole thing was a criminal scam in some way. I mean, what sort of person, let alone a 17-year old high school student, wouldn't want to brag to the world that he'd just made a couple million trading on the stock market? I guess this scam turned sour and now he's trying to distance himself from it. Kinda funny, really.
Some years ago (when I first started investing) I bought some penny stocks and was very disappointed to see them amount to nothing but dismissed that as a mistake of poor investment choice. Then I saw that Pepsi had a new beverage they were calling the "purple beverage" and I thought this would be a smart investment because, it's Pepsi! Never saw it in stores, never heard or seen any ads for this junk. Well, again this stock purchase tanked and I lost all interest in penny stocks. Like Petesede said above, "it is pure gambling" except in this case, the house does win every time! Penny stocks are no good.
I remember when this was first reported, people kept lauding him on social media and saying that this is what kids should do with their lives. I'm not sure what the sources were, but I remember publications like The Daily Mail and People reporting on this as if it were true and verified. In hindsight, of course, it's a social case study of just how easily people can believe everything they read without looking into it further. Once this kid and his friend got caught lying, they looked so scared and stressed in interviews. Probably because the interviewers themselves were angry and embarrassed for having fallen for it in the first place.
It is impossible to make this much money by simply trading penny stocks. It needs advanced knowledge and a huge capital to make this much money so I say this news is complete BS.
