trading bible, page-21

Trade4profit had announced his arrival on the Cudeco share register two hours earlier on the HotCopper forum. He said he had been in and out of the stock for about a week. But Trade4profit was no ordinary investor.

The best window on the anonymous world of the day traders comes from the two big online forums: and the somewhat wilder HotCopper, which is controlled by EBet chairman Michael Hale, who owns 43 per cent of the holding company ahead of parties associated with Brent Potts of Southern Cross Equities with 29 per cent and former Pancontinental chief Tony Grey with 14.9 per cent.

Potts would certainly understand the appeal of anonymity: he has maintained a Swiss share-trading account for close to two decades.

Joining HotCopper only requires an email address and a nickname. Members can operate multiple accounts simultaneously (known as "multi-nics"), which means that in theory not only can members talk up stocks endlessly without revealing their identity or their sources, it is also possible to fabricate entire exchanges or "threads" between different personas that they control.

HotCopper has tightened up on multi-nics and regularly suspends members, but warns that while some comments posted may be aimed at manipulating investors, "it is not possible for management to moderate posts, so many misleading and inaccurate posts may still appear on these forums".

A HotCopper exchange can be a brutal affair. With virtually everyone on the thread holding shares in a particular company, there are no words strong enough to refer to a poster who suggests that the share price might go down.

In four years of regular posting, Trade4profit has attracted a devoted following on HotCopper and elsewhere. He describes himself as Melbourne based. He has a distinctive writing style - one that several other regular posters seem to share.

One of these posters who shares similar IP addresses with Trade4profit is linked to a holiday home in eastern Victoria and uses "exbanker" as part of an email address.

While Trade4profit stresses that he has no geological background, he often posts analyses of mining reserves from which he draws extremely bullish predictions. Results have been mixed. He was a big supporter of Cazaly Resources last year before it lost its bid for a mining lease and recently led a disastrous plunge into Jupiter Energy options.

Trade4profit is a quick study. Four days after he began posting on AMI, he posted a detailed forecast that AMI's Cloncurry prospect had indicated reserves of 61 million tonnes of copper and concluded the shares were worth at least $10.

He would later boast that this was remarkably close to the 59 million tonnes of indicated reserves that AMI announced six days later. It also echoed the bullish optimism that would mark the Market Place Securities report.

Trade4profit followed this up with a stream of detailed charts and overlays with likely drilling plans and projections of the deposit. He had obtained them he said "through detailed investigative research".

He told the AFR yesterday that all his information came from public sources: "Absolutely none was obtained from the company or anyone related to the company."

In later postings, he referred to "a few chats" with McCrae as part of his due diligence.

At a time when press coverage had turned bad "behind closed doors in private briefings, a different story was being told!", he said. "I know . . . because I was privy to at least one of them!"

He advised simple tactics to defeat automated trading systems, which would help push up the price.

Most of all he warned investors that a big mining company, the "Accumulator", was secretly building a stake in the company.

This was shown both on the days when the share price rose from the secret buying and on the days when it fell - clear proof, he wrote, that the Accumulator was "down-ramping" in order to buy the stock cheaply. This was even more reason for day traders to buy, a point Trade4profit pushed relentlessly in post after post as the dominant figure on the thread.

As the price rose, HotCopper members who had bought on his advice were gushingly grateful. "You are indeed a stock god t4p," wrote one supporter. "I for one want to grovel at your feet."

Trade4profit told the AFR in an email he saw Cudeco as a classic case of a company being outside the control of the "suits", nameless figures who "have done everything in their power to bring it all undone".