After he had picked and bought his stock, he would write a single message about it and stick it up in as many places on Yahoo Finance as he could between 5 and 8 in the morning, when he left home for school. There were no explicit rules on Yahoo Finance, but there were constraints. The first was that Yahoo limited the number of messages he could post using one e-mail address. He would click onto Yahoo and open an account with one of his four AOL screen names; a few minutes later, Yahoo, mysteriously, would tell him that his messages could no longer be delivered. Eventually, he figured out that they must have some limit that they weren't telling people about. He got around it by grabbing another of his four AOL screen names and creating another Yahoo account. By rotating his four AOL screen names, he found he could get his message onto maybe 200 Yahoo message boards before school.

He also found that when he went to do it the next time, with a different stock, Yahoo would no longer accept messages from his AOL screen names. So he was forced to create four more screen names and start over again. Yahoo never told him he shouldn't do this. ''The account would be just, like, deleted,'' he said. ''Yahoo never had a policy; it's just what I figured out.'' The S.E.C. accused Jonathan of trying to seem like more than one person when he promoted his stocks, but when you see how and why he did what he did, that is clearly false. (For instance, he ignored the feature on Yahoo that enables users to employ up to seven different ''fictitious names'' for each e-mail address.) It's more true to say that he was trying to simulate an appearance on CNBC.

Over time, he learned that some messages had more effect on the stock market than others. ''I definitely refined it,'' he said of his Internet persona. ''In the beginning, I would write, like, very professionally. But then I started putting stuff in caps and using exclamation points and making it sound more exciting. That worked better. When it's more exciting, it draws people's attention to it compared to when you write like, dull or something.'' The trick was to find a stock that he could get excited about. He sifted the Internet chat rooms and the shopping mall with three things in mind: 1) ''It had to be in the area of the stock market that is likely to become a popular play''; 2) ''it had to be undervalued compared to similar companies''; and 3) ''it had to be undiscovered -- not that many people talking about it on the message boards.''

Over a couple of months, I drifted in and out of Jonathan Lebed's life and became used to its staccato rhythms. His defining trait was that the strangest things happened to him, and he just thought of them as perfectly normal -- and there was no one around to clarify matters. The threat of being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Newark and sent away to a juvenile detention center still hung over him, but he didn't give any of it a second thought. He had his parents, his 12-year-old sister Dana and a crowd of friends at Cedar Grove High School, most of whom owned pieces of Internet businesses and all of whom speculated in the stock market. ''There are three groups of kids in our school,'' one of them explained to me. ''There's the jocks, there's the druggies and there's us -- the more business oriented. The jocks and the druggies respect what we do. At first, a lot of the kids are, like, What are you doing? But once kids see money, they get excited.''

The first time I heard this version of the social structure of Cedar Grove High, I hadn't taken it seriously. But then one day I went out with Jonathan and one of his friends, Keith Graham, into a neighboring suburb to do what they liked to do most when they weren't doing business, shoot pool. We parked the car and set out down an unprosperous street in search of the pool hall.

''Remember West Coast Video?'' Keith said drolly.

I looked up. We were walking past a derelict building with ''West Coast Video'' stenciled on its plate glass.

Jonathan chuckled knowingly. ''We owned, like, half the company.''

I looked at him. He seemed perfectly serious. He began to tick off the reasons for his investment. ''First, they were about to open an Internet subsidiary; second, they were going to sell DVD's when no other video chain. . . . ''