This is after Google Finance was misreporting lots of share prices yesterday evening. But this was official enough to trigger a 52-week low notification for users of the Fidelity Investments site. Any of you market obsessives out there want to explain what's going on? Technical glitch, or some sort of wily trader gamesmanship? Because if somebody actually caught a nearly 200-point swing in a trade of Google shares, they just made a mint.

Update: Even MSN Money reported a day low of $0.01, generally a sign that trading has been halted for some reason. Curioser and curioser. NASDAQ is investigating, with CNBC reporting that NASDAQ cancelled some trades, and set the official closing price at $400.52. As one tipster speculated based on reports of a low at $200, "I bet you a nickel some ass traded 400 shares at 200 instead of 200 shares at 400."

John M. Thompson, CEO of Symantec, according to Google Finance

Hooray! Silicon Valley has black people! They're just disguised as white people!

Symantec Corporation [Google Finance]
The New Symantec [Symantec]

Today, says Google Finance, Google Inc. is worth $10.09 less per share than this morning. That's:

$323 mil less for Sergey - time to buy a cheaper bullwhip.
$331 mil less for Larry - No prob, he doesn't care, he'll keep smiling, he loves his girl, HE'S HAPPY DAMMIT.

Google Inc. [Google Finance]

Which is fine, and Handheld is surely a fine upstanding company. Just that the Mercury News says 54 percent of reverse mergers fail within two years.

And that reverse mergers are an old tactic for corrupt stock dumps.

And that Handheld lost $2.3 million in the first nine months of 2005.

And that one of the few Google results for its two-week-old stock symbol is a blog post that basically reads, "Don't invest in them. They're not making money."

Page's brother uses tactic with tainted history [Mercury News]
Handheld Entertainment (ZVue) Sort of Goes Public [SharkJumping]

Update: I don't know a thing about finance. A reader explains why, in great detail, after the jump.

Forgot to include the caveat in this entry: I'm just messing around with the Carl Page story, and did not mean to actually imply any knowledge whatsoever of real financial dealings. Here's one reader's e-mail explaining why Carl Page doesn't suck.

This was a really bad post which seems to just highlight a lack of knowledge with respect to finance and especially financial engineering. You should really be sending this kind of post past a few investment bankers, consultants or MBA types before putting it up rather than just going for some cheap shots based on bad Mercury News reporting.

Reverse mergers tend to be used as an inexpensive and fast way of raising capital. You bypass the skim of the typical M&A house and can get money without having to pay for the bridge financing (provided by your underwriters or VCs) that takes you through the months of an IPO. It's a great way to go public and raise money for companies that are ill-served or ill-matched for the VC funding model and not big enough or developed enough for a classic IPO, where the typical process's fees represent a minimal amount of the money raised. The reason why so many reverse mergers go bad is that they tend to be early stage companies. It is an especially popular tactic in the resources sector, where exploratory startups typically raise money in public markets rather than through private sources such as VC as is the case in Tech.

So should one be more cautious about buying shares in a reverse takeover? Sure. Is it because they are crooked? Uhh, no.

As to why Google Financial isn't showing much info on Handheld: cause it's not trading on an exchange, but rather in the Over The Counter: Bulletin Board (aka OTC:BB, aka ".OB"). When you look up other OTC stocks, you don't find their information listed on Google Financial either.

OTC stocks and reverse takeovers tend to be very risky. They are very speculative (either based on high risk new ventures, or a stock is OTC because it was delisted due to significant problems and is a turn around story) and have small market caps. Have their been a number of crooked things happening in these stocks? Yes, just as there have been many crooked things happening in other public and private companies, and in charities, government, education... Implying that 54% fail due to pump and dump is just wrong.

I'm a big fan of the site, loved the Larry and Lucy pics (big props on getting on CNBC), you've been writing some great stuff and are really committing to the project by leaving school to do it. But on these posts, you're wrong, you're bad, and it doesn't seem like you know what you're doing.

Wow. Points taken, lesson learned, and big bouquets of flowers sent to the Page brothers.

Yahoo Finance shows HNDH.OB bouncing from $6 to $6.80 (on a path drawn by Harold and the Purple Crayon). Google Finance, not so much. Search in Google Proper and it isn't sure what you want.

Man, Larry, help a brother out!

Handheld Entertainment [Google Finance]
Handheld Entertainment [Yahoo Finance]

Last night, Google's front-page link to Finance went to a big old 404 message. So the link was taken down, despite scads of blog posts celebrating the new service.

But hey, that's what the beta tag is for. Everything worked by morning, and on opening day, Google Finance ran a victorious headline: "Google Finance launches and Japan beats Cuba." Good job, headline relevancy algorithm. Good job.

Google Finance [Google]