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The problem is the phishers only have to succeed once. I've been using email since 1987. In that time I've identified and deleted hundreds if not thousands of phishing emails. But I fell for one - it was a phishing email claiming to be from eBay about a problem with my recent winning bid. It just so happened that I had won a bid earlier in the day. So I clicked on it and logged into my eBay account.

I realized what I'd done within 30 seconds. Logged out, logged into eBay in another browser, and immediately changed my password. But it made me realize that even if you're 99.9% successful at avoiding phishing emails, that still means you'll slip up every now and then.

I understand now why those phishing emails claiming that there's a problem with your FedEx package aren't as stupid as I always thought ("How dumb are these guys - I'm not even expecting a package via FedEx"). They're just spamming it to tens of millions of people. A few hundred thousand of them are expecting a FedEx package, and the phishers are gambling that a few hundred or a few thousand of them will click-through on the phishing email. It's a one-shot variant of the perfect prediction scam, leveraging the huge scalability of spamming to eliminate the multiple iterations normally needed to run the con. If it's "obvious" the email is a phishing email, it just means you fell into the 99% or so of people who by random chance didn't fall within the parameters to successfully pull off the con.

Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.

A bunch of people predicted it. They were ignored.
"Irrational exuberance" Greenspan called it

Here's a website devoted to documenting the people who predicted the bubble
http://investorhome.com/predicted.htm
They even quote Warren Buffet calling derivatives "time bombs."

Informationally Partitioned Simian Launched Projectile Selection.

You seem to be quite hostile to concepts from basic finance.

It does not show the analysts picks were bad. It shows that you cannot reliably pick good stocks despite your skill. All these techniques we have are often rendered useless and irrelevant by the way the market reacts.

My point was that price is typically dictated by perceived value. You just reiterated the point of the analyses I mentioned, which is to compare the market price with your projection for the future market price. I can definitely price almost any stock in favor or against any of my predictions, even with justification. This is why you'll often see 3 big firms saying different things. They all have their own case, but no one really knows what is going to happen. You look like a great analyst if you prediction is good, a dog if it is way off. There is no way to predict a stock price, but there are ways to perhaps statistically increase your chances of picking better on AVERAGE, hence an analysis of future price.

If you want a source, please pickup just about any finance textbook written in the past 20 years. The source = Wall Street Journal. Alternatively, I can search for my old graduate thesis in finance that has some good examples related to forecasting. I suggest you do some reading from an old profession of mine at http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/.

Darts can be found at http://www.investorhome.com/darts.htm

The plural of "anecdote" is not data!

Even though you acknowledge the overall statistics, you then rely on one person's experiences for choosing not to wear a seatbelt in many circumstances to overrule the statistics.

To see why this is crazy, imagine asking a 1000 people all across the country to toss (fair and balanced) coins. Ask the 500 or so people who get heads to toss again. Ask the 250 or so people who get heads that time to toss again. And so on, through 125, 62, 31, 15, 7, 3, till you're left with 1 person. Now this 1 person has tossed a coin 10 times and it's come up heads every time! [1]

Now if you didn't know much about coin tossing, except a statistic that said they come up tails about 50% of the time, and you only knew that one person, should you believe her if she says "Well, the statistics say tails comes up 50% of the time, but from what I've seen, it's heads all the way!"?

Unless you know of a broad survery of many accident investigators who detect a tendancy for low-speed or low-traffic density accident injuries to be increased in either number or severity because of seat belts, then you must take what you're hearing with a hefty grain of salt, even if what they are saying is 100% true[2]. (By the way, I fail to see the difference in between accidently wrapping oneself around a telephone pole on a busy road vs. a quiet road.)

Don't forget there's an obvious potentail for observer's bias here too: you're not seeing his formal reports, but just the stories he's choosing to share with you in an environment which encourages entertaining conversation, not neccessarily statistically accurate conversation.

In the absence of such of survey, perhaps the best thing is to consider the failure mode you're really concerened about: it's not that wearing a seat belt is bad during the accident, but that you may be trapped afterwards. Put a box cutter or similar within reach, say in the door drawer. If you can't operate the cutter because of unconsciousness or severe injury, well, in your condition, you weren't getting of that car anyway .

[1] There's actually a well known stock-market scam which operates in very much this fashion.

[2] The furor over silicone breast implants is another good example: a lot of women honestly reported problems after breast implants, but when all was said and done, their problems were coincidental.

It's not investing, it's speculation.

Speculation is very risky; investing is somewhat risky.

The difference between the two is well described here.

In short, investors are interested in a company's intrinsic value (as reflected in its business fundamentals); speculators are interested in how other people will value a company (as reflected in the stock price).

Someone buying SCOX is either a speculator or a (most likely) deluded investor.

stock prices do go up following a split.

you can't deny that the jump is predictable and real.

Can you provide a reference to a statistically validated study to support this claim? All splits on the NYSE are reported; it should be simple enough to do a study of the price increases resulting for all the splits over the last ten years. I'd expect to see such results in some place like the Journal of Finance; it would doubtless be a feather in the cap of someone wishing to overturn the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

If your claim were true, then even the weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis would be false.

However, those that actually study such things (as opposed to those that are out to sell you their Technical Analysis Newsletter) find things like the following:

"Elaborate tests of the correlation of successive prices, runs, and filter rules find some weak relationships, but they are not sufficient to generate trading profits after taking account of transactions costs."

It seems entirely more likely that if stock prices continue to rise after a split, this results not from the split itself, but rather for whatever reasons there were for the stock to rise in price before, perhaps because the enterprise is continuing to reap unexpectedly high profits.