is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
After digging quite a bit, I did find one that's apparently a happy ending. All of the stocks that were halted in 2003 that I'd run across working in reverse chronological order where either not trading or were trading between $0.001 and $0.0001 until I ran across this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HLSH.PK&t=2y
Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure these two never traded another share. I could be wrong. Nice reference there at the SEC, but it'd nice if there were a reference listing all of those and whether or not they resumed trading:
RMIL: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-39471.txt
DGIV: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions/34-41607.htm
Guess I'm definitely wrong on DGIV. I see it last traded a few days ago. Although it looks like 4 trades in the past 4 years.
Would be nice if these filings consistently included tickers. Anyway, going through the Q1/05 suspensions, we've got:
MXDY.PK: Still trading. $0.02 pre-halt. Now $0.007
TFCY.PK: Still trading. New officers and accountants. Looks like post-halt price similar to pre-halt.
GTEI.OB: Last trade a month before halt.
IACH.OB: Last trade day before halt.
TKRN.OB: Last trade day before halt.
MCNJ.PK: Still trading at about same level.
CMCH.PK: Last trade day before halt. Was 83 cents.
CSDP.PK: Still trading about one trade every other day.
Okay, not counting CMKX, that's 8 halts this quarter, half of which are currently trading.
Let's meet in the middle and say we're both right. <g>
I didn't add my name to the iBox until after he'd written that, as a gentle way of giving him an idea who he'd just written a personal attack to.
My apologies on misunderstanding your meaning of "admin". In that context, your statement was correct.
And doubley proud of the fact that I was banned by the only admin that banned himself.
As I mentioned in a message of just a minute ago, I'm not an admin here, but it's very much "my house" the same way it's also Matt's.
My banning myself was my own way of protesting that Janice had been banned from it and that the deleted posts of hers I saw shouldn't have been deleted, IMO.
And a way of protesting "private boards", since I've long been on the record as being strongly opposed to them. It won't be happening again.
Correction. One of the owners. President and CEO. I don't enforce the rules and don't want to. That's Matt's job. However, since it's as much my site as Matt's, I do weigh in with my opinion from time to time.
Of all the stocks the SEC has suspended, I think 99.9% of them resumed trading after ten days.
I wonder what the actual number is. I'm not aware of all of the stocks that the SEC has suspended, but very nearly all of the dozens I've personally seen have never traded again. I *think* MTEI did end up eventually trading again, but couldn't swear to it, nor remember whether the trading started again after 10 days.
I think it's safe to say, though, that 90% of stocks that are suspended then return to trading never trade past a fraction of the price of the last pre-halt trade.
For the record, I'm not into Schadenfreude. It pisses me off (at a number of people, mostly the companies themselves and the "shout-down-or-silence-the-critics" touts) when people lose money (often 100% of their investment) in these issues, but I've also known a number of people who got burned in these deals, didn't have their entire portfolio wrapped up in them, and survived financially to be far more astute investors.
In fact, many among the "basher" ranks are just such people. Ones who were fooled badly enough to have lost money in a scam but not so badly fooled that they lost every penny. They learned the calling cards of scams and pipe up when that familiar scent is wafting up from the message-board pages.
I was about to say that I couldn't imagine any scam that could top HCCA (I wish I could find what size their reverse split was -- it was enormous! And just freed them to print up a bunch more paper again) and did a quick search and see that HCCA has even been discussed *here* recently!
A relief to know it wasn't a figure presented by the company. Such a statement, had it come from the company, shouldn't have passed SEC muster for more than about 5 minutes.
Is there really an expectation that it'll trade again on the 17th? When I saw it'd been halted I assumed based on past observations that the fat lady was taking her curtain call.
I've never really paid any attention to Pinks before, so don't know if the rules are different, but I've seen MANY an OTCBB stock get temporarily halted, never to trade again. If the SEC eventually does nothing, does a pink sheet stock need the same Marketmaker signoffs (essentially assuming an uncomfortable amount of responsibility for the veracity of the company's statements, if I remember correctly) that an OTCBB does/did?
Dealing with unknown (to me) names, so I've yet to determine who's an idiot and who isn't. But revelation is slowly dawning.
Where'd that 54-cent figure come from? Surely not the company itself.
Nice! That's some work that'd do the FBNA'ers proud! Although FBNA material generally was more articulate, but I assume the fact that the post is really difficult to follow is part of the gag.
Oh. It *is* a joke, right?
And maybe they/he/she/it doesn't. Who the heck is "Soros"? Not seeing the name anywhere on my business cards.
Edit: Nevermind. I thought I'd heard the name before, and a later post pointing to another post refreshed my memory who he is.
So I've gotta assume your comment that maybe he owns iHub was part of the same dry wit of the post to which someone else referred me.
Does that, like, make you feel better? Important? What?
I really do have trouble understanding the psychology behind personal attacks.
Why is it that some people can't grasp that it's not about "saving" those who've already bought and are busy waving pom-pons, but in seeing to it that if someone is a potential buyer, they make that decision armed with real information rather than only the positive opinions that're allowed by those who already own?
Amazing!
I wonder if any remorse is felt by those who silenced a few folks who were effectively saying that CMKX was not a good stock to buy.
I haven't been following the discussion anywhere and only found out yesterday that it'd been halted. But I bet I can guess. Things like "This halt is a good thing." "It's gonna open a lot higher." or even "It's gonna open". Oh, and I'm sure "bashers" are getting blamed.
Did I hear correctly that the OS turned out to be over 3/4 or a TRILLION shares? Wasn't there a lot of talk that it was nowhere near that, and a lot of blame being leveled at "naked shorts"?
Janice, I'm sure you're out there. You tell me. RMIL, part 134?
Out of curiosity, how'd this board come to its current state? Did Matt lay down the law and Mach decided he couldn't abide by the site's rules (his post about what he would and wouldn't allow made me rip the leather on my office chair) or did Mach decide on his own that iHub wasn't the right place to hang his shingle and declare ownership?
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to add to the simplified TOU something like "If you create a board here, remember that WE own the site and all its boards; not you, so all boards must comply with OUR rules." And direct anyone to that page whenever they create their first board.
I want to get this "free private board" camel as far away from the tent as possible.
Of course, anyone can create an effectively "private" board for any topic they like on SI and ban anyone they like, but if the penny-stock folks think they can create a "basher-free" board on SI and get away with it, they'd be in for a rude awakening. We wouldn't have to intervene at all. They'd spend too much time banning people (and unable to delete any pre-ban posts they'd made) to ever get a chance to tout the next stock whose value the SEC determines shall be zero.
I've said it before and I'll say it again that I don't want our sites to ever be the kinds of venues where people can use tools like deletion to create a "warm fuzzy" board.
I'm still not remotely pleased with Advanced Search performance so, before resorting to a separate Search server, I'm going to segregate it by year ala SI and make the Public Msgs search at the top just do the current year.
I think a huge part of our problem not only on the retrieval side of things but the catalog update side is we're dealing with a single table much large than any of the individual tables on SI. Not that we have more messages. Just that our total messages are more numerous than any single year of messages on SI.
It looks like regular Public Msgs search is pretty close to realtime now.
I still have quite a bit to do to Advanced Search, though and it's late enough in the day, I probably won't get any of it started today, so I'll be shooting for next week.
Had never seen that Linux ad before. Cool!!!
I can't imagine us ever being anything but a Microsoft/Dell shop.
Took *forever* to move SI from Solaris/Oracle to Windoze/SQL Server. I know nothing of *nix, and know enough of Oracle to despise it.
Worst-case scenario (which I'm now seriously considering) is buying another server with a decent CPU, a bit of memory, and a zoomy and roomy IDE hard drive and using it for everything search-related for both sites. The RAID5 setup that both sites use on their db servers is definitely not the ideal setup for the multitude of small reads and writes the full-text indexer is constantly doing, although it's darned near ideal for the huge reads it does when a search is run.
But if I move all full-text search related activities to a separate machine that does nothing *but* that, not only should the ceiling get raised quite a bit when it comes to search performance, it'll also free up a lot of headroom on the existing servers.
SI has an amazing amount of headroom. iHub still contains a lot of inherited inefficiencies that won't get completely addressed until I move it to ASP.NET, although a lot of those inefficiences are in the database itself and I'm starting to address that. Until then, offloading search to another machine should really help with the headroom situation. And the beauty of it is that I don't need to get a Dell Server-class machine for this. This can easily be done more than well enough by a beige box. Fast CPU, a couple gig of memory, and a fast hard drive.
I don't remember what time Happy Hour runs, but it's programmatically assured to happen at the same day/time every week. Sometime after the close today, I think.
Nah. I don't fall over except when I decide to ride to work on snow and ice.
The bars were like that when he bought the bike and I told him that though the bike seemed fine, the bent bars were really driving me crazy.
Interesting that the site is performing so well right now, although I wouldn't bet any money that Search works.
The database CPU's are running at 80% utilization right now, mostly due to something MSSearch is doing. All I can really do at this point is just let it finish what it thinks it must. And hope it's done by morning when 20% CPU left for other things won't be enough to keep up.
Edit: Since it was in the middle of doing a batch of updates for about 30k posts when I rebooted the machine, I suspect it might be rebuilding the whole catalog from scratch.
Funny. And interesting timing. My best friend was just mentioning that I'm planning to straighten the handlebars on the motorcycle he recently bought. I started to tell him he'd really hate to watch how I'm gonna do it, then remembered he grew up on a farm, so he'd understand.
Exactly. Not only can you not mess things up by yanking spark plug wires, you also can't determine if the spark plugs need replacing.
Wow!
My bad on two counts.
First, I had disabled change tracking on the regular message table so the machine wouldn't get swamped building indexes for two tables. That's why the search at the top of the screen wasn't updating.
Second, I re-enabled it and the server freaked!!! Finally had to reboot it.
We've got serious search-related issues going on here. It also takes over half an hour to copy just 8000 new messages from the message table to the new search table (at night) and takes several hours to add those 8000 messages to the full-text catalog.
Serious problem happening. Not a clue what yet. MSSearch, in typical MSFT fashion, tries to be too helpful by keeping the hood welded shut.
I'm in the same boat as you on ELN. I did manage to buy most of my shares in the $5.60 range, but sold them at less than a buck higher. And sold my Mar7.5 calls the day before yesterday at break-even.
So I'm feeling rather sick watching it. So far, it's looking like the most money I've ever left on the table. As in 70% of the value of my trading account, at today's pre-market prices!
I really expected a pullback to the 5's after it got into the mid 6's, then a more gradual climb back up.
But there's been a buying panic in it for quite a while now.
Just ran across this while doing some testing of the new version of Advanced Search.
so what's next !!! do we buy the bull out ???
It's been discussed a lot and they've been approached repeatedly, but we've since decided to forget about it. We're taking their marketshare steadily without having to spend a dime for it.
Who knows? It might reach a point, like it did with Silicon Investor, where we've done enough damage that we finally get the phone call that says "Okay, if you're interested, now's a good time to give us a bid. What info do you need?"
Personally, I'd far rather acquire Raging Bull and put our featureset, speed, and reliability on it then largely leave it alone, mostly for iHub's sake. A lot of folks who come over from RB have trouble adjusting to our culture and especially the active enforcement of our rules and rather than booting them left and right or adjusting our rules to accommodate them, I'd be far happier to have them under our umbrella as a separate site. I'd rather iHub remain iHub and not change to be more RB-like or more accommodating to RB refugees. We're able to easily observe the outcome of that.
But at this point, I wouldn't pay much to make that happen.
We've been in contact with the current owners and though no real numbers (stats and what we'd be willing to pay) were discussed, there was an obvious undercurrent that the current owners value it much more highly than we do.
The database server was extremely busy for a while. Should be lots better now.
I finally figured out how I can make search eventually run much faster not only here, but on SI without segregating search tables by year.
There are a lot of words that're being indexed that aren't technically considered "noise" words (they're not in the file noise.eng), but that really should be.
I'd been looking all over the internet for some time for a way to peek under the hood of MSSearch, specifically to find out what words are indexed the most frequently, then take "noise" ones, add them to noise.eng, and rebuild the full-text catalogs.
A perfect example is "LOL". Nobody can conceivably want to find a post because it has the word "LOL" in it. Yet it's so often used, even with search running a LOT faster now, a search on LOL will time out because there are so many messages with that in them. Search for "ELN", and you get results in 2-3 seconds. Search for "LOL" and you get a timeout.
Anyway, I just figured out a way I can programmatically get a count of the number of times each word is indexed (well, more accurately, the number of messages that contain each word) then scan through perhaps the top 1000 of them manually, identify "noise" words like "LOL", add them to noise.eng, rebuild the catalogs, and probably have such an efficient system that even SI's 21MM+ messages can all be in one catalog rather than one for each year.
That'll be a kind of "pet" project to do in my spare time long-term, though. The immediate project is to get all variations of Search working much better with fewer timeouts.
My time today got 100% soaked up in dealing with ad sales (nice problem to have, when sales are the outcome), so no time was put in on the public search until just now, where I'm working on it from home.
For now, until I get the routines written to auto-populate/update the search table, newer messages aren't available in Advanced Search unless I run the catch-up routine, which I just did a little while ago.
There seem to be other problems, though, that I haven't put my finger on yet. It took over half an hour to copy 8000 messages to the search table, which is horrible. And while the copying was happening, searches were timing out. Now a typical one takes about 14 seconds, which is unacceptable to me, although part of that may be the cataloger catching up and keeping the CPU busy. We'll see if the results are any better once it's caught up.
For now, until I get Advanced Search changed, regular Public Msg search should yield near-realtime results though it'll probably run slowly and occasionally time out.
A new version of Advanced Search for Public messages is now in production, but the index population is far from complete and the routines aren't in production yet for realtime updating of the index. I won't be able to put that into production until this initial index population is completed.
In my testing, public searches in Advanced Search are now taking 2-3 seconds to run. Definitely good enough. However, this speed might be due in large part to the fact that at this point, only about half of the indexing is done.
I'll also have to apply the same changes to the regular (non-advanced) public msg search, then do the same to both versions of Private message searching.
Enough work for me tonight. I'm turning in.
Well, this one's an ambulance-chaser class action. And there's certainly no evidence yet to give it any merit.
There definitely won't be a class-action from the patients who were taking the drug, as it was really helping a lot of them, all of whom were suffering from a terminal disease.
If there's any class action from the patients, they'd sue to get it back on the market.
Edit: Though I value the company substantially north of its current price, I think the run of the past two days has gotten way ahead of itself. It needs to pull back and try again, more slowly this time.
I'm waiting for the pullback.
FYI to everyone.
I've started full-text index population on the new Public Message Search table. Right now, it's using about 65% of the database server's CPU. That's a bunch, but the remaining 35% is more than enough to handle night-time traffic around here.
Let's cross our fingers and hope it's done by tomorrow morning. If it's not, things could be a bit (an understatement) slow until it's done.
I started it 7 minutes ago and it's processed 70k messages. So call it 10k per minute. 4.2MM messages divided by 10k per minute equals 420 minutes equals 7 hours. We should be just fine.
Depending on other demands placed on me tomorrow, I should be able to make decent headway on rewriting the few lines of code it'll take in Advanced Search to make it use this table, the stored procedures to insert and update the search table when new public messages are posted, and add code to the posting routines to call the new procs.
I'm not going to give an ETA on that, mainly because I have no idea what other hands will be on my time tomorrow, but it's less than 8 hours of work involved and rest assured that fixing Advanced Search is my highest priority behind putting out bigger fires and dealing with advertisers.
I *might* work on it some tonight, but working on the site is more than a little painful and far less than 100% productive when dealing with a single laptop on dialup rather than the 3 monitors and DSL I have at the office.
Looks to me like he's forgetting the "[" in the closing "/chart" tag.
I do plan to eventually do that here, but prefer not to until the size of the public message search table requires it. I like having the whole thing searchable for as long as possible, plus it's a whole 'nother project to implement that. What I'm doing now is a first step in that project.
But another reason I plan to eventually do it that way is because on SI, the year the user selects dictates which message table will be searched. Only affects the "FROM" clause.
The way it's done here and will continue to be done until I make that change, the query also includes a somewhat expense set of date checks in the where clause.
Looks like the query to populate the publicmsgsearch table should be done in another several minutes. And it's still not really burdening the database box. Unfortunately, I'll definitely have to wait until afterhours to enable full-text indexing on it. I learned the hard way on SI that when you start a full index population, you can kiss about 80% of your CPU goodbye for hours.
I've written the beginnings of the query that'll keep the publicmsgsearch table synched but can't finish it until I've removed the fields from the search table that we won't need. Which is a LOT of them.
If you get the sneaking suspicion I seriously sandbagged the ETA on this, I (sneakily) suspect you might be right. I'm planning to work on it until my daughter calls to tell me to come home and bring or fix dinner. <g>
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300217/EN-US/
It's correct for me to have that checkbox checked. I guess the best we can hope for is that the modification to the search backend will remove enough of the overall load the machine is grunting through and make it able to keep the indexes closer to realtime.
Another option that I'm sure would help but I don't want to do until necessary is to segregate messages by year into separate search tables like I do on SI. That way, full-text indexing is trying to keep up with a far smaller table.
The inner workings of MSSearch are quite the secret. So, for all I know, there may be a cost associated with it looking for any changes in a 5MM-row table that would be far smaller if it's tracking changes in a much smaller table. Returning results would definitely be a lot faster, though. SI's Advanced Search is a real screamer. It doesn't track changes for prior-year search tables because changes to them won't happen. So no overhead there. It only tracks changes for the current-year search table.
This may or may not help. I can't directly "force" MSSearch to make sure it's realtime. However, it does try to be, but doesn't update itself unless it feels there's enough available computing horsepower to do so without getting in the way of the other work the machine is doing. And as I'm sure you can imagine, the machine is never even close to being idle. This time of day, it's probably doing several hundred transactions per second.
However, I'll check to see what the "Update Index in Background" checkbox actually means. Maybe if I uncheck it, it'll keep the index realtime no matter the cost. There's certanly enough headroom for it to be able to do so.
The ideal solution would be to have a separate db box that's only used for searches and full-text indexing, but that's not in the cards soon.
Looks like we won't see a lot of slowness in the near future on this project. I'm copying public messages out to a new table and though it'll probably take over 24 hours to finish, the cost isn't particularly high.
Update: On second thought, we might've reached some functional threshhold for SQL's CONTAINS() function. It's being reported as 98% of the cost.
My hypothesis at this point is that either MSSearch is unable to allocate the amount of resources it really needs to do its thing quickly, or we've been reaching a point of exponential increase in the relationship between dataset size and search times. That a 1% increase in dataset size may have been resulting in a 10% increase in execution cost, then a 20% increase in cost for the next 1% dataset growth, etc.
I'm not going to try to fix the current methodology because the "breakage" seems to be in MSSearch, which I can't do anything about directly.
I'm going to go ahead and redo the backend part of it so it works more like SI. iHub searches the actual message table. SI has the message table copied (with only the necessary fields) into what I call "search tables", and those are the tables that actually get searched.
Just copying public messages to one table and private messages to another table will help a lot, since nearly a quarter of the 5.7MM messages are private. And part of the query has been to use a text field (very expensive) to limit the query to either public or private. The change I'll make will allow the system to just search the relevant table and not have a separate expensive where clause making sure only public or private messages are searched.
So, bottom line is Advanced Search is very, very broken right now. And the system is going to slow down a bit because the work I'm going to do is so time-consuming I can't do it at night.
I'll shoot for having Advanced Search working for Public messages again sometime next week. Private messages the week after.
FYI, Matt made me aware this morning that Advanced Search timing out is a consistent thing. When Dave mentioned it to me yesterday, I thought it was occasional.
Something's definitely broken and I'm making this my top priority right now.
I'll keep you posted on progress. This isn't a simple matter (as I'd thought) of the message table having gotten too big. Something's broken. These queries used to take 5-10 seconds (barely acceptable) and I already had figured out how to make it a lot faster (but will take a lot of work and time to implement), but the one I just now ran directly from SQL took 2 minutes, 48 seconds. Definitely not acceptable.
Someone ELSE is into both ELN and SANM?
Talk about seller's remorse! Geez, ELN's on a tear! Left a lot of money on the table. But at this rate, my calls are starting to look really good. Not so my SANM calls, but they've got quite a bit of time left.