Having all kinds of problems with ValueClick ads right now and not having much luck addressing them yet, so I've taken ValueClick out of the mix completely for a while. Turns out that the majority of the ads they've been serving to us for about a week have been their in-house ad, which doesn't pay us a cent. And it's been causing problems with one of our other agencies when they redirect us to ValueClick if they don't have an ad available for us.
So right now we're just on ads our inhouse rep has sold and ads from an ad exchange site.
I was looking through the ads and noticed one that says something about information "your full-service broker doesn't want you to know."
For some reason this got me to thinking about a phone call I got a few weeks ago that I kept meaning to mention but also kept forgetting.
Though I've been out of the market for about a year save for some LT positions (F, JNPR, and QTRN if you must know), I often get cold-called by "brokers" with some can't-miss trade I really need to get into.
This time it was GLW. This guy was telling me how insiders have been buying the stock lately and how the stock has a track record of strong gains anytime the insiders are buying. Okay, decent pitch. Insider buying is generally a good sign and even a better sign if the insiders are always right. Okay, we'll exclude Trip Hawkins and THDO from this. I don't think he's made a purchase of his company's stock yet that wouldn't have been most appropriately accompanied by a flushing sound.
Back to GLW. It was trading at $4.75. As usual, my repeatedly saying I'm not in the market these days wasn't getting him off the phone. Granted, I could just hang up, but I like to be more creative. So he wants me to buy 10k shares of GLW through him. Then 1k. Then just 100 shares and I could open and fund the account after the fact.
I told him I'm no chartist but the chart looks toppy to my ignorant eyes, but would he wait a sec while I checked something.
I opened up Notepad and loudly typed in a bunch of random characters to sound like I was really busy.
Then I told him I have my own investment philosophy that says "If someone wants you to buy something, it's because they want to sell it." and that I'm now short 10k shares of GLW at $4.72 and would he please call me back in a month and if I lose money on this trade, I'll be more inclined to listen to him next time.
He hung up on me. Bet I never hear from him again.
I see GLW is at $3.24 right now. Wish I really was short it short-term, but I never shorted solid companies even as trades unless I learned their patterns real well first and I'm just trying to ride a familiar wave. Used to do it all the time with SRE.
So, I'm going to test this approach for a while. Whenever someone calls to sell me stock, ask for the ticker, type into Notepad, and tell them I'm shorting it at market and would they call me back in a month. Should at least shorten these darned phone calls, and if I'm lucky, reduce or eliminate them.
AI
Market Data 
Markets 
