http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/16/new-york-magazines-72-million-teenage-stock-picker-says-he-made-it-all-up/?tid=trending_strip_4

New York Magazine’s $72 million teenage stock trader says he made it all up

By Terrence McCoy and Elahe Izadi December 16 at 12:51 PM

Seventeen-year-old Mohammed Islam wants you to think he’s a big shot. On his Web site, Ettaz Financial, he wears a pair of fogged-over glasses, expression serious, sporting a red tie on a snowy day. The New York high-school senior says he got interested in the financial industry “at the tender age of 8,” quickly fell into the third-rate world of penny stocks before graduating to the futures market after finding “a love for risk and volatility.” How much has he made? Millions, he said. His net worth has soared into the “high eight figures.”

The world is filled with teenagers like Mo Islam, who now says he never made a dime on the stock market. They play fast and loose with facts. But they don’t usually get the treatment Islam just got in Sunday’s issue of New York magazine.

Now the magazine has issued an apology for that story about the high school senior. “We were duped,” reads a statement released Tuesday and also posted as an editor’s note on the story itself. “Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers.”

The article, reported and written by staff writer Jessica Pressler, begins with a rumor. Someone — it’s unspecified who — said Mo had pocketed $72 million by trading penny stocks. “An unbelievable amount of money for anyone, not least a high-school student, but as far as rumors go, this one seemed legit,” Pressler wrote. The original headline: “A Stuyvesant Senior Made $72 Million Trading Stocks on His Lunch Break.”