Monkeys Everywhere - Financial Trickery!

Here's a funny joke I received the other day, which really does sum up legal scams in financial markets all over the world.

A man offered to buy monkeys from a village.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at Rs 10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He further announced that he would now buy at Rs 20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to Rs 25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs 35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell it to him for Rs 50."

The villagers combined their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere! WELCOME TO THE INDIAN STOCK MARKET!!!!!!
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Made me laugh. Though the above could easily be applied to some of the private equity/investment bank deals in developed markets lately where re-floated companies have tanked after going public, yet the private equity fat cats and their advising investment banks have walked away with large profits leaving investors who bought in the IPO with large losses. I myself have suffered a similar fate with Dyno Nobel (DXL) which I bought during its IPO for $2.69 and now wallows around the $2 mark. Guess which millionaire factory investment bank brokered that IPO?

Photo Courtesy MarkNick