While home reading Slashdot in his underwear (a favorite pastime of unemployed IT workers), Sendai comes up with a new investment strategy. A pathetic little company named Fiasco is falsely claiming ownership of Linux copyrights, trying to extort money from users, and filing multibillion dollar lawsuits. Sendai is sure that this is a stock scam and that Fiasco s claims are frivolous. Meanwhile, mainstream investors seem so fixated by the enormous amount of money Fiasco seeks that they lose their critical thinking ability. The stock is bid up from pennies to over $5! Sendai takes out a huge short position, planning to cover when the stock tumbles back down. Since the claims have no merit, that can t take long.

Boy is he wrong! The Fiasco stock (symbol: SCUMX) climbs rapidly. At $9 per share, Sendai receives a margin call from his broker. Being unwilling to take the huge SCUMX loss, Sendai sells all his other positions and also wires most of the balance from his checking account to the brokerage. This allows him to hold the position, which is certain to plummet soon! It rises further. Maybe this is still due to initial uncritical hype. Perhaps the momentum traders are on board now. Maybe some investors know that anti-Linux corporations Microsoft and Sun secretly are funneling money to Fiasco. At $12, Sendai is woken by another early morning margin call and he lacks the money to further fund the account. He is forced to buy back shares...