Portfolio Pumping

Adult film parody of Wolf of Wall Street? A beginner's weightlifting class for scrawny quant-types working at investment banks?

Nope. Actually, it's an illegal practice meant to make your investment fund look better by manipulating the prices of the assets you hold.

You run an investment fund. It’s been a lackluster quarter. Your customers are going to be very disappointed when they get their quarterly statements. However, you still have a couple days left to do something about it. So you spend some of the cash you have in reserve to bid up the shares you already own. You want to drive prices higher on the assets you hold. That way, your returns look better for the quarterly report.

The process isn't very useful if you're holding shares of things like AMZN or AAPL, where millions of shares are traded each day...not much opportunity to impact the market. But if you hold assets that are less liquid (penny stocks or other off-the-beaten-track investments), even a little buying interest can spark a meaningful gain.

But, unfortunately for your plans, the practice of portfolio pumping (also known as "painting the tape") is illegal, likely to get you in trouble with the SEC. Whether the film Portfolio Pumping is illegal is a different story. That probably depends on the Supreme Court's current stance on obscenity.