Friday, October 4, 2013

The Final Nail in the Efficient Market Hypothesis' Coffin

If you don't know what the Efficient Market Hypothesis is, you're probably not reading this.  If you believe in it, then I submit for your consideration the strange ride of the shares of Tweeter Home Electronics today.  The nearly illiquid, OTC shares of this recently bankrupt home electronics retailer soared about %1500 at one point today.  Why?  Because the smart money realized that Tweeter is back from the dead to take over retailing?  No, because apparently many folks believed that they were buying shares in Twitter, which announced it is filing for an IPO.  I've never really believed in the "smart money" but we now know there is some not so smart money.  Here is a link to an article on Tweeter's journey:

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20131004&id=16968494

Of course, maybe there really is smart money behind this.  Maybe some research indicating that in the run-up to an IPO a lot of careless people buy stocks with similar names or ticker symbols to the new company.  Or maybe even after the IPO, careless folks buy similar stocks.  Maybe Tweeter really is a smart play.  And maybe, just maybe, this phenomenon could be duplicated with the next hot tech IPO, i.e. find a stock with a similar name in the run up to the IPO.

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