Internet Typo Sparks Stock Rally

(NY, NY) A typo in a market forecast by on-line broker Roofus, Doofus & Co. has had Wall Street spinning and Human Genome stocks rising, from the oddest of places - fantasy role-playing gamers.

When Winston Twiddle, a senior analyst with Roofus, Doofus & Co., keyed in his report on the prospects of the biotech stock sector, he left an "e" out of genome and touted the upside of stocks tracking the genetic code of gnomes. While the average investor would be unlikely to see this as anything other than a typo, through the speed of the Internet, word of gnome investment opportunities spread quickly to realm of online gamers, who frequently encounter gnomes in games such as Dungeons & Dragons and War Hammer. Gnomes are a race of small, dwarf-like people traceable to Norse mythology and perhaps best known as the little statues in people's gardens.

The result was a newly tapped circle of individual investors pumping an estimated 34.7 million dollars into genome stocks like Celera and Human Genome Sciences, Inc., driving shares up an average of 28%.

"This may sound out of place," said Barry Milhorn, a stockbroker specializing in the portfolios of the socially phobic. "But the entire gnome typo has unearthed a new type of investor. An investor who's needs are not being served in the current climate. An investor I like to call the 'flexible reality' investor."

Milhorn credited the popularity of games like Magic: The Gathering and the long-awaited film version of the Dungeons and Dragons game with creating a climate conducive to investment in gnomes. Milhorn said more typos of that nature would only be good for the market and it would be particularly good for his commissions if someone would write about a publicly traded company manufacturing Kryptonite.

Strangely enough, once word of the typo got out, while trading on genome stocks did slow down, the price did not dip back to pre-gnome levels, and the investors who got in on the fantasy-buying frenzy do not appear to have cashed in the stocks upon learning of the error.

"What, you want me to ruin their day," Milhorn seemed skeptical about an investor sell-off. "These guys paid good money to invest in the genetic sequencing of an imaginary life form and you want me to tell them they're wrong? It would kill them, and let's face it, anyone who'd invest in a company specializing in gnomes aren't too likely to be reading the newspaper everyday. It's best we leave them to their fantasies."