StockCloud - a press release mashup

I was browsing around online today when I came across an interesting mashup called Stock Cloud.

The creators themselves say “We’ve been a bit less then successful extracting business partnership data but we have collected a fair amount of interesting data to date and as such I felt motivated to share it with the world … thus Stock Cloud was born.”

From what I can tell, Stock Cloud only tracks publicly traded companies, so its abilities are limited, but the idea is still neat. What I find even more interesting is that the companies with the biggest clouds are no-namers.

What happens, and it happens a lot, is that you get small time companies that do a reverse merger where they essentially merge with a defunct company that was once public. It’s much cheaper to do it this way. Then, they try to pump the stock by putting out numerous and meaningless press releases every week in order to try and get the stock price to go up. It’s a pretty dishonest investor relations strategy.

So, if anything, Stock Cloud potentially does a great job of identifying companies that are known as “pumpers and dumpers.” Once they get the price up, they dump the stock, and people lose out. If you want to learn more IR strategy from a guy who runs one of the most experienced investor relations firms in Utah, read David Politis’ blog. The guy knows what he’s talking about in this area.

(David Politis is my employer, BUT I haven’t met another person in Utah who understands IR like he does).