The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

How Cool Is This? Well, it takes the heat out of fire

For those who caught the wave late, it ended badly, of course. The Nasdaq halted trading in the stock, pending further information. And when that further information came out this Wednesday, it wasn't so encouraging.

Abatix, you see, backed away from the miraculous claims it made last week. Among other "clarifications," the company now says any of last week's claims as to the "efficacy and uniqueness" of the RapidCool products are based on representations made by their developer "and have not been verified by Abatix, except through its viewing of certain product demonstrations, and have not been verified by any third party."

And remember the "FDA approved RapidCool(TM) burn cream"? Another, uh, "clarification" was necessary. "The RapidCool(TM) burn cream does not have FDA approval," Abatix said Wednesday. Got that? The FDA approved RapidCool burn cream does not, in fact, have FDA approval.

By the time Abatix started trading again this Wednesday, interest in the stock had rapidly cooled. It closed at $9.77.

Who's the greater fool here? Abatix, or the people who jumped into the stock? Give us a chance to test that RapidCool burn cream, and we'll let you know.

5. As the Daily Planet Turns

But back to our investment news for childish adults: We've got some hot news about Daily Planet, the first publicly traded brothel in Australia -- and perhaps the world.

One year after going public, Daily Planet plans to sell off its namesake brothel, change its name and focus on the strip club business, Reuters reported this week.

"Whilst the Daily Planet brand was a great launch platform for us, we've had a lot of resistance from shareholders and advisers because of the perception that we're in the prostitution business," Chief Executive Andrew Harris told Reuters.

Yes, hard to figure how people ever got the idea that Daily Planet was involved in prostitution. We can't be sure, but we have a guess: Maybe, just maybe, it had to do with all that discussion of prostitution in the prospectus. Plus all those pictures in there of naked women.

Yeah, maybe that had something to do with it.

Daily Planet could have avoided this "resistence" problem, of course, if management had paid attention to the research lab in December 2002, when we wrote about its IPO plans.

Back then, we pointed out that Daily Planet wasn't actually a house of prostitution, but the landlord to a house of prostitution.

We also had some sage advice from George Flint, a longtime spokesman for the legalized prostitution community in Nevada. Explaining why no brothels had gone public in the U.S., he wisely pointed out that investing in sex is like actually doing it: Everybody talks about how they want to do it, but not enough of us have any follow-through.