It’s the end of the world as I’ve known it, but I feel fine

livemint.com:

chakri" in the kya lagta hai stock market lingo. Given the low volumes of such stocks, as soon as this pre-agreed buying and selling would come in, the price of the stock would start to go up. Once the price went up regularly for a few days, it would appear on the radar of retail investors looking to make a quick buck.

Once retail buying started to come in, the chakri operators would sell and quickly exit the stock. Like in any Ponzi scheme, the sooner you entered such a stock, the more money you made. But by the time the retail investors would enter such a stock, its price had already been run up as much as the operators wanted it, and it was time for them to sell.

This would lead to the stock price falling, with retail investors usually losing money in such situations. As is the case with almost every financial market, the insiders took the outsiders for a ride. My landlord thought that as I worked for a newspaper I would have access to insider information on such setups and be able to share some ’tips’ with him.

Now, as it turned out, I had no access to such information. The landlord equated the lack of tips from me to the absence of a quid pro quo. So, before I could scratch his back, he decided to scratch mine, and started giving me tips.

These would typically be penny stocks. Dear reader, we are in 2024, and close to two decades have passed, so you might be wondering what triggered this memory. Well, in the recent months, I have been asked for stock tips after many years: investors want tips on which small cap stocks they should put their money in.