Anyone who plays the market needs a good laugh daily. iTulip wants to be a player.
"We make worthless junk for you to buy over the Internet," is the site's motto. They sell impressive-looking but totally worthless stock certificates with the somewhat-skewed reasoning that investors will buy anything related to the Net. For added strangeness, there's also a "Haiku of the Day" available.
The site is clever, entertaining -- and a touch educational. Read about the 17th-Century Dutch mania that pushed the prices of flower bulbs to outrageous levels before the inevitable crash, and then get background on other financial and stock market "bubbles" throughout history.
The site quotes frequently from Charles MacKay's classic book, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" as a warning to investors and asks in a poll the eternal question: "Will the market crash?"
