Sell Billions, Make Millions
The Securities and Exchange Commission is out with another action on the trading in CMKM Diamonds, a company I have written about before.

The new action concerns one Daryl Anderson, a Las Vegas stockbroker, who is said to have sold 259 billion shares of unregistered stock in CMKM. The S.E.C. says the shares brought in $53.3 million in proceeds and generated $2.3 million in commissions for Mr. Anderson.

What caught my attention was that Mr. Anderson’s commissions could be viewed as either very low, or very high. They came to, by my arithmetic, about one-thousandth of a penny per share, which sounds very very low. That is about 4 percent of the proceeds, which sounds very high. The average price per share was about two one-hundredths of a penny.

He also made the money on just 569 trades, which means that the average trade was for 455 million shares, and produced commissions of about $4,000.

In any case, the buyers would up with stock that is worthless. In this era of electronic trading, they can’t even use the certificates as wallpaper.

http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/...