More (and hopefully final) Kingsmead

"Daniel Goldsmith" called me back tonight with the spiel for buying into an IPO on an institutional investment rate.

The IPO deal was for a company called USA Oil And Gas Corp (Nice and generic, huh? Although the company does appear to exist.) and how they were about to be snapped up by Halliburton and be given vast amounts of previously untenable oilfields to extract oil from.

(At least he didn't read out the URL in pseudo-milspeak like he did the company one: "Kilo! India! November! Golf! Sierra! Mike! Echo! Alpha! Delta! Papa! Echo! er, dot com". I was so tempted to come back with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!)

He reckoned that the opening price for the IPO would be USD 1.95, but I could get on board for USD 1.50 and cash in after the IPO.

While explaining the details of the deal, he was really hammering on the "little yeses". This is a sales technique which involves getting the sucker 'valued customer' to agree with you at each incremental step along the way so that they hopefully agree to give you all their money at the end.

I told him I wasn't interested in doing business. He got quite angry at that point and, although he managed to control himself, he started getting quite snappy. He told me that if I didn't get on board now, I'd be sorry in five weeks (the IPO time), and he'd call me back to gloat.

When I mentioned finding negative reviews of KingsmeadPE on the Motley Fool forums and how they appeared to be a Boiler Room, he started up with a cock and bull story about how a disgruntled office junior named Walters was poisoning the good name of the company. At that point, I hung up on him, having better things to do.