Devoted to understanding the basics and fundamentals of investing

If you wanted to engage in illegal activity and drive down the price of a stock you might want some help.  It would be necessary to have a broker who was cooperative.  It would be useful to have some journalist who would be willing to write not one or two negative stories but hundreds of them.  It would be nice if you had a couple of regulators who out of zealousness or avariceness were willing to launch multiple investigations of your target company.

In the research that Patrick M. Byrne the CEO of Overstock.com has done in the last two years he has found all of these things occur and in a very organized basis.  The same people seem to be involved at each of the locations with devastating effects on the companies.

Under the sustained attack of failed delivery on naked short sells, regulatory investigations and massive negative publicity the price of the stocks can be driven down to penny stock prices.  The seller can make hundreds of millions of dollars, plenty to go around to the collaborators.