Page 100 of Tangled

Happy Trading,

TwistyTrader

QueenMod and PikachuMod threw their support behind him, affirming that TwistyTrader had agreed to buy any and all shares of GameShack for thirty-five cents at the close of the stock exchanges, Eastern Time, and they trusted him to make good on his promise.

The mods would make sure that TwistyTrader wasn’t conning them. It was safe to do it.

The scavenging began.

The Sherwood Forest forum was an excellent place to learn the more occult areas of the financial markets, such as where to buy penny stocks that were not listed on the major exchanges. Because those stocks are considered trash, they are neither regulated nor arbitraged as regularly as blue chips and the other major stocks on the NYSE or Chicago.

As soon as GameShack had fallen below a buck a share, it had landed on the mean streets of the penny stock exchanges.

Colleen watched it all and did the math in her head. She was also running around the penny stock exchanges and picking up the stock with the money she’d made over the years by doing the opposite of what the Killer Whales had told the small fish to do.

While there was a bit of hand-wringing in the Sherwood Forest forum about whether TwistyTrader would make good on his promise, many hundreds of people zoomed around back alleys of the internet and bought up the stock for anything less than thirty-five cents. That number formed a hard ceiling, so their buying didn’t bump the stock up any higher than that.

The shares were vacuumed up so fast that the minnows and sea bass of Sherwood Forest purchased approximatelyseventy percentof GameShack’s stock in just the last hour of trading.

Their plan had worked astonishingly well,farbetter than they’d expected. They’d hoped for forty percent, quite honestly, and Tristan would’ve had to buy the rest of what he needed on the other exchanges in after-hours trading.

Colleen and Anjali were whooping with excitement and giggling over their laptops.

“Oh,yar,weownGameShack,” Anjali said, laughing.

Colleen took another look at just how much stock the Sherwood Forest collective had bought and how much was still outstanding.

Yeah, they had.

They’dboughtGameShack.

By buying over fifty percent of the stock, the collective traders of Sherwoodownedthe GameShack company.

Even with thirty-ish percent of the stock still floating around, with an agreement among the Sherwood Forest investors, they could do anything they wanted to with the company. They could take it private. They could fire the board of directors and the CEO and hire anyone they wanted to take their places.

If they all agreed, they could change the business model or liquidate any part of the business they wanted to.

The minnows of Sherwood ForestactuallyownedGameShack.

Colleen’s stomach clenched.

This wasbad.

This was very, very bad.

54

Backfired

Tristan

Tristan cracked his knuckles at his computer and sent his pre-written post.

His message appeared as a new post on the main forum and in the Small Pond room.

Time to make good on my promise. I will now buy all that stock from everyone for thirty-SIX cents per share.

Details to come within the next ten minutes about transferring the stock to my accounts.