50 Cent's Advice Not Worth A Quarter

There was a bunch of hubbub last week and earlier in the week that rap superstar 50 Cent was promoting a penny stock H & H Imports. It's been all over the place, from CNBC to main stream media.

The key takeaway here is that just because he's famous, he's not qualified to give financial advice.

Sure 50 invested in Glaceau before it was bought by Coke (NYSE: KO) a few years ago for $4.1 billion. It doesn't make him an investment wizard. He has a team of experts telling him what to do. He has an account at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), and given how many millions of records he's sold, I'd say it was a rather large one.

You didn't hear him pumping Glaceau when he was in it. It wasn't ever a publicly traded company sure, but if he was such an investing genius, he would've been able to tell you sympathy plays off his investment.

You need to be careful of what you see on twitter from celebrities, when they are trying to promote certain products. Not everything is on the up and up. Maybe H&H does become a big thing, and the headphones that have 50's name on them will be a hot seller, and some electronics company will come and snap them up. I wouldn't count on it though. If you have some money that you want to throw away, then fine, go ahead and take a chance. This isn't for money you can't afford to lose.

If you play around in the penny space, be careful shorting the name, as you never know when the company is likely to put out a press release with 50 Cent's name on it, hyping up the product. I have no idea how well the headphones work or don't, I've never tried the, but you didn't see Dr. Dre doing this with his headphones. It makes you wonder, that's for sure.

People's lives and fortunes are at stake, and you can't get rich if you die tryin.'