A scene from "Wolf of Wall Street" plays out in real life (sort of). See the daily chart of the penny stock that went through the roof because of mistaken identity.

Opps! Here is a nice example of "Animal Spirits" on steroids.

Google recently announced it was going to purchase a company called Nest,  that makes high tech thermostats and fire equipment, for $3.2 billion dollars

However, it looks like the biggest (in the short term anyway) beneficiary is a company called NESTOR that is traded in the stock market under the tracking name "NEST".  See the confusion?  However, Nestor makes and sells traffic control equipment to cities.

Prior to Google's purchase NEST was traded on the stock market for, get this, $.0020 cents PER SHARE. Yes you read that right.

Below is a screen shot of the stock from Yahoo Finance I took a few minutes ago.  You can see the price is invisible until yesterday afternoon.  It had a meteoric ride up to $.10 cents.

So, if you bought $1,000 dollars of NEST at $.0020 per share you would own 500,000 shares.  If you were able to sell at the high point you would have ($.10 X 500,000 shares) $50,000.

That is quite a rate of return.

Note: you can see the price I snapped on is $.0021 (in blue near the time and date).  I could not get the cursor to settle on the low point of $.0020)