Friday, February 17, 2017

Florida Man Conspires To Blow Up Target Stores To Crash Stock (TGT)

Frankly I think the stock gets hurt more for not being Amazon, or for the bathroom brouhaha than it would for exploding stores.

$65.72 up 0.52 (0.80%)

From Fortune:

A Florida Man Reportedly Tried to Blow Up Target Stores to Hurt the Company’s Stock
Buy low, sell high, so goes the investing adage.

But rather than waiting for markets to hit the right conditions, a Florida man allegedly tried to tank Target's stock by setting off homemade explosives in several of the superstore's East Coast locations. according to a Thursday criminal complaint filed by Department of Justice prosecutors in a federal court.

A registered sex offender, 48-year-old Mark Charles Barnett offered an unnamed affiliate $10,000 to place 10 operational homemade explosives in 10 Target stores in Florida, Virginia, and New York, the complaint alleges. The explosives, which were capable of causing "serious injury and death to nearby persons," were expected to be placed on shelves while disguised as food products.

"Once the boxes had detonated inside of Target stores, Barnett theorized that the company's stock value would plunge allowing him to acquire shares cheaply before an eventual rebound," the complaint read.

But instead of doing as instructed, the unnamed affiliate turned in the explosives to federal officials, and worked with law enforcement in the investigation.

At one point during the investigation, Barnett told the affiliate to "start at Syracuse and work your way back down [to Florida]," the complaint alleged, saying that Barnett added: "Put one in each state, I guess."....MORE
 And here's a story about Target's former parent, Dayton-Hudson, that I've told a few times, most recently in 2013's "Attention Commodities Speculators: Hoarding is Now a Stand-alone Mental Disorder":
...Even if committed all is not lost on the manipulation front.

If you get phone privileges while in hospital remember this enterprising fellow who called up the DJ newswire and gave them the scoop:

New York Times, June 24, 1987:

A bogus takeover offer for the Dayton Hudson Corporation caused the retailer's stock to shoot up $9 a share yesterday, but skepticism quickly deflated the gain, inflicting a $15 million loss on investors.The chain of events began yesterday morning with a telephone call from a Cincinnati securities analyst, Paul David Herrlinger, to the Dow Jones News Service, in which the offer was made on behalf of ''Stone Inc.'' It ended five hours later with an announcement by the Herrlinger family's attorney that ''this was not a bona fide offer and there is no such company as Stone Inc.'' He said Mr. Herrlinger had a nervous condition and had apparently been hospitalized.

In the interim, 5.2 million shares of Dayton Hudson's common stock changed hands, much of it in the early afternoon, before the credibility of the $70-a-share offer was shattered. Rumors of a Takeover Bid

At 9:49 in the morning, 19 minutes after the New York Stock Exchange opened, the Dow Jones ticker printed its first story on the purported offer. At 9:53 A.M., the New York Stock Exchange halted trading in Dayton Hudson stock to allow the news to be disseminated....MORE
And in other Florida Man news: