If you don’t follow the stock market, you are missing some amazingdrama. While the headlines go to jailed CEOs from Enron, Worldcom, RiteAid, Tyco, etc, they are alljust greedyguys gone bad, and gone to jail. But drama outside the courtroom abounds. Some funny, some serious, some unfortunate, but none have taken on the XFiles qualities of this story.
In the free world, the CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne hasemerged as the star of his own XFiles like drama. Insteadof searching for the truth about extraterrestials, Mr Byrne is on a mission to find out the truth about short sellers and naked short selling.
I have written in the past about both topics, so I won’t go into that here. There is no need to write about the performance of the company, Jeff Matthews does that well in his blog. There are blogs that praise Mr Byrne as well.But I will suggest that anyone who wants to listen to a drama, that is stranger than fiction andplays out like aradio show from the 40s (I used to love to buy tapes of the old shows and listen) with plenty of comedic elements, they immediately go to the overstock.com website and sign up to listen to the conference call
Never before in the history of Wall Street has a single conference call mentioned the following topics:
Miscreants, an unnamed Sith Lord he hopes the feds will bury under a prison, gay bath houses, whether he is gay, does cocaine, both or neither, and an obligatory, not that there is anything wrong with that, phone taps, phone lines misdirected to Mexico, arrested reporters, payoffs, conspiracies, crooks, egomaniacs, fools,paranoia, which newspapers are shills and for who, payoffs, money laundering, hisIrish temper,false identities, threats, intimidation, and private investigators. All in 61 minutes.
As I listened, allI could think of was whether or not HDNet Films should consider making a movie out of it andthat Mr Byrne clearly was giving Tom Cruise a run for his money on the “what was he thinking meter”.
I can’t wait to see how this plays out.
In the interest of disclosure, I am short 10k shares of OSTK. I want to be short more, however the stock is impossible to borrow, the puts are expensive and it’s hard to get any volume off and I don’t know how to Naked Short a stock. If you or anyone you know has naked shorted a stock, or knows how or where I can,I would be curious to find out how it’s done, so please feel free to add it as a comment below.
If you are a screenwriter or movie producer and you put together a script about OSTK and Mr Byrne, please send me a copy!