Every time you look at your inbox, there it is... SPAM! Your penis needs enlargement, a horny single girl from Russia "accidentally" emailed you, and a former Nigerian prince knows that you're just the man to safeguard his millions. But in 2007, while still a student at MIT, one particular kind caught my eye: stock spam. Those bizarre stock market "tips" that claim you should buy a particular stock because it's "about to go through the roof!!!!" Like most people, I initially thought nothing of these ridiculous emails. That was until Kyle Vogt (now of Justin.tv) proposed the stupidest idea I had ever heard: "There has to be some way we can make money off these spammers". After trying, and failing, to prove Kyle wrong, the two of us embarked on a 4-month study into the dark depths of stock spam. In this talk, I'll explain how we went from hand-sorting tens of thousands of spam emails to developing a trading strategy able to take a piece of the spammers' profits. And how, in the process, our work produced data that disproved the results of nearly all the existing stock spam research.
<strong>Grant Jordan</strong>: Mild-mannered electrical engineer by day, electronic safe-cracking tool designer by night. He's been known to spend his spare time reading spam, looking for obscure loopholes in sweepstakes rules, and pretending to be a professional photographer.