“It’s all just a pool filled with sharks,” said Urska Velikonja, a law professor who studies securities regulation at Georgetown University Law Center. “It’s where the unwary go to get eaten.”Penny stock booms tend to occur during raging bull markets, when greed abounds. They were hot in the 1980s, when the arrival of cheap, long-distance telephone service gave rise to brokerage firms that specialized in high-pressure, cold-call pitches of worthless stocks.That was the specialty of Blinder, Robinson & Company, which was led by Meyer Blinder, a New York broker with a flamboyant reputation. In the mid-80s, …
