The Swog Blog

Then I remembered a story I‘d read as a student about making money from stock market predictions – perhaps this is what our friends on the forum were considering?

Suppose we start out with 96 000 active email addresses (it could be any other large number, but for the sake of illustration here, 96 000 is conveniently divisible by 2). We send out a message to half of them saying “Glaxo stock will rise this week, don‘t miss out!”, and to the other half, “Glaxo stock will fall this week”.

To half our prediction will be correct, and we discard the half who got the wrong prediction. The following week, we send out the same message to half of our remaining 48 000.

Again, to half of them we will make a correct prediction, and those to whom our second prediction was incorrect, we discard.

The next week we repeat this, sending out predictions to the remaining 24 000 in a 50:50 ratio and so on.

Repeat until we’ve sent out 5 sets of email and are left with the email addresses of 3 000 individuals who’ve received an astounding 5 correct predictions from us.

The following week, send the 50:50 split of predictions and inform them that in order to continue to receive these and other amazing predictions they must subscribe to your newsletter at an annual rate of $19.99.

As I mentioned above, I neither recommend nor condone this and I am sure there is a law against it (if there isn’t there should be!)

 

If you liked this post, subscribe to The Swog Blog's RSS feed.

Filed under: Miscellaneous