This Stock Whiz Kid Stays in the Picture

Of all the bull market's icons, few captured the public's imagination more than Jonathan G. Lebed. The high school junior from Cedar Grove, N.J., seemed to embody an Internet-driven market that had spun wildly out of control. Lebed was 15 in September, 2000, when the Securities & Exchange Commission accused him of running a pump-and-dump scheme using Internet message boards. Almost before the ink was dry on the cease-and-desist order (in which he neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing), Lebed had become a media darling -- an adolescent version of the analyst delinquency that had begun to garner headlines.

Well, Jonathan Lebed is back. The young man who was a one-kid stock-fraud army in the view of the SEC -- which accused him of netting $272,000 by buying stocks and hyping them on the Net -- is again pushing stocks. But this time, there's a crucial difference. Lebed insists that while he is indeed promoting microcap stocks on his Web site, in e-mail spams, and on message boards, he no longer takes positions in them unless they are clearly disclosed. Pumping without dumping, in other words. Which is not to say that he is even the slightest bit bothered by all that SEC fuss. Says Lebed: "I never thought there was anything wrong with what I did."