Oh momma, have I got a hot tamale for you.

Wikimadness XVII: The Return of Byrne

Naked Short Selling Is One Problem A Slumping Market Shouldn't Have

"Next week, the SEC will implement an emergency order designed to prevent naked short selling in the financial firms that the Federal Reserve Board has designated as eligible for access to its liquidity facilities."

Not exactly a rousing halleluja for Mr. Byrne, but it does put all the Mantan stuff into a deep perspective.

And the bitch fest goes on, and on, and on.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Naked_short_selling



Where is Gary Weiss when you need him?
It might be fun to poke him with a stick right about now.....

Yeah, but JzG told me the SEC was composed entirely of Bagley socks. Anyone care to bet on the odds of a rangeblock in that general direction? If they take out half of DC now *that* might cause some press coverage...

All this Byrne stuff is about one thing: the crappy performance of OSTK.

Well color me stupid, I'm just a long time programmer with an interest in math & physics.

Shouldn't it be obvious that naked short selling is wrong? I mean, if a company has N number of stocks, then for any given day it shouldn't have N+x number of stocks where x!=0?

Wouldn't this violate the 2nd Law of Ecodynamics

I've left notices of the new Register article on the talk pages of the articles in question, plus Byrne has left a huge list of sources to use to update his and the Naked Short Selling article. I think the tone of those articles will be changed dramatically in a week or two with this new development.

Here's another perspective.

Dammit, I KNEW I should've bought that stock after Mantanmoreland was blocked! Another golden opportunity squandered... story of my life.

Six months, statistics boy? How about a year or max?

And now, for MY take on economics....

Have a stiff dose of "scholarly writing".

"Economics is not a real science....but try telling that to economists."

Nah, best to wait until the Sith Lord is caught, then BUY BUY BUY!

Statistics like that only tell half the story - like how Overstock has been briefed against. Perhaps the share price is a reflection of the failure of the likes of Gary Weiss vs. Overstock after some success? Perhaps Overstock would have done better without the distractions - or perhaps they would have gone under due to an unhindered shorting campaign. Who knows?

Excuses. There are ways for management to give back to the people who invest in a company. Problem is, things like dividends and buying back stock take money. It's easier to blame Gary, the Sith Lord, the Russian Mafia, the Israeli Mafia, rabbit holes, Wikipedia, the financial system etc. and just hope that enough sucker investors hang in there earning 0% year after year to keep the gravy train rolling.

<sigh> Not excuses, simply an observation that you cannot use stock market performance to make any real judgement on whether the company is being managed properly - which of course begs the question why the world's economy is based on stock market gambling.

Come off it. It's not like they're curing cancer or inventing better light bulbs. They're selling crap over the internet. The name of the game is making money.

True, but that's no reason to shaft them from the outside as opposed to shafting anyone else.

I never understood the massive hate on Overstock, except if it was strictly for Byrne's huge hate for naked shorting, and how that conflicted apparently with Weiss's agenda or whatever. I mean... here's OSTK broken down by time period for growth. And the Street is not frankly that stupid:

Today: +0.24/1.19%
5 days: +0.48/2.41%
1 month: -3.13/-13.32% ok... not so hot
3 months: -1.59/-7.24% but it starts to average, and this time-wise lines up with the general economic downtick. I'd discount this. Everyone is struggling in this time frame somewhat.
6 months: +9.30/84.01% Hello, growth.
YTD: -0.14/-0.68% Not horrible, not bad, not great.

I didn't look at the profit numbers/income, but this is not the mark of a bad stock by ANY stretch. And they're doing apples and oranges with Amazon, the gold standard of e-commerce.

What is OSTK doing wrong, again...?

Umm, that would be losing $6m every quarter. Patrick Byrne might be a great guy, but in order to have a business, you need to sell stuff at positive margin. He doesn't seem to have worked that out. Yes, the hole isn't quite as deep as it was, and he may have pulled out, but he's losing about a dollar a share, he has over $70m in structural debt (vs. about $86m in cash on hand), and a price-to-book ration of 55x. I'd sooner buy junk bonds.

(Obligatory disclosure: I am against naked short selling. I am for short selling, and I have made money shorting OSTK in the past (as well as other companies such as WFMI and WBMD). I do not currently hold a position -- short or long -- in OSTK.)

congrats W-R!

you've let "emperor" succeed is changing the subject of the thread to a stock analysis of OSTK stock. Well done. It's just what the Gary Weiss's of the world do when their bullshit is shown by the SEC, FOIA act information from the DTCC, etc, to be just that.....a diversionary tactic from the fact that finanical institutions and regulators have let stock fraud occur. A very profitable fraud for the only sources some of these journalists have. Not a coincidence.

Meanwhile, back at the wikiranch, janey ryan has unilaterally declared the El Reg to be verboten.

How about this one, Janey? Looks like a reputable, published, magazine.

And it's all over the Weiss-Byrne story.

http://sgsdigital.com/pubs/wasatch/current/

How many sources are you petty little children on WP going to poo-poo away? There's going to be more. Enjoy...

and just what is up with Tony? Does he think that like Slimmy, he can get better sympathy for his bullshit by being a girly girl on WP? First Jenny, now Janey, what next? Candi?

fair enough, like I said I wasn't looking at the deep financials, just the stock price itself. Thats not a good burn rate... has it been lessening month over month to the point it will turn profitable before that cash on hand runs out, if no new investors come in?

Actually, it's been up and down, and $6m is worse than other recent quarters, but he has $86m in cash, so he'll be around for a a while. I should also say I have nothing against OSTK, but part of the market is making money on stocks which appear to be overpriced when the market realizes that, which I do.

Regarding Piperdown's comment -- you're right, this shouldn't be about OSTK, and I'm sorry I contributed to it. Mantanmoreland's use of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's knee-jerk defense of him, was reprehensible. Patrick Bryne may be a self-promoter, but heck, that's business. Something claiming to be an encyclopedia needs a higher standard.

This case (naked short selling) mirrors a number of others, such as Israel-Palestine and Intelligent Design-Evolution, where a real-world controversy has spilled over into Wikipedia (not remarkable), and the partisans have successfully enlisted various factions in the Wikipedia elite to defend their position, enraging the partisans, but more importantly demolishing the notion that WP has any hope of being an unbiased, scholarly, reliable source of information.

Not that Wikipedia is fixable, but if someone thought it was, the first thing to do would be to remove most, if not all, of the "current events" pages in it, and quarantine controversial pages for six months or more. This would make it less attractive to partisans who want to push their worldview on everyone while pretending that it is "fact".

Where did Janey Ryan say it was Tony?

Jeany. Joan. J's, Z,'s or G's. No Bambis. Perhaps a nice Ziporrah.

AND take out all the BLPs. There's no area that can cause more legal problems than biased biographies........of people who aren't dead and can sue.