The pump and dump experience
This post was originally published on my old finance blog in February 2021. Transferred here as I am no longer maintaining that site.
Not every post in this finance journal is a good news story. There are losses, mistakes, and moments of poor judgment — and I think it is important to write about those as much as the wins. The lessons from bad trades tend to stick better anyway.
This is one of those posts.
The setup
In April 2020, a stock called Biolidics (8YY.SI) had a significant pump — I missed it entirely. Its parent company, Clearbridge Medical (1H3.SI), started moving sharply upward on 23rd April 2020. Watching a related stock run, having just missed the original move, I felt the pull of FOMO — fear of missing out.
I bought Clearbridge at SGD 0.38. Its all-time high, as it turned out, was SGD 0.39.
My queue filled. Immediately after, the stock dropped to around 20 cents in under two minutes.
I could not sell in time. DBS Vickers does not support stop-loss orders, and placing a manual sell queue takes long enough that by the time I had done it, the damage was done.
What actually happened
It was a textbook pump and dump. Someone — or a group — had accumulated a position, driven the price up rapidly to attract buyers like me, and then sold everything at the peak. The people left holding at the top take the loss. The people who executed the pump take the profit.
At the time of writing this post, Clearbridge was sitting at around 15 cents. I was down over 50% on the position.
What I learned
The lesson is simple and brutal: chasing a stock that is already moving fast, driven by nothing fundamental, is almost never a good idea. The people who profit from pump and dumps need buyers at the top. FOMO turns you into that buyer.
A few things that would have helped:
- No position in a stock I had not researched — I knew nothing about Clearbridge’s fundamentals
- A stop-loss in place — even if DBS Vickers makes it inconvenient, the discipline matters
- Recognising the pattern — a stock moving from 15 cents to 39 cents in a very short time on no news is a warning sign, not an invitation
The market will always create another opportunity. Missing one is survivable. Chasing it into a pump and dump is considerably more expensive.
This is not financial advice. Just a record of one mistake and what it cost.
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