Gary
thx for reading sharesleuth. A couple things:
1. while i dont short all the companies we write about, I do short companies we uncover but choose not to write about. So the effort has been very profitable for me.
2. The reason we dont write about everything we find is because while there are many companies with Overstock quality management that are worth shorting, not all are frauds. We write about the companies that either are frauds or are associated with people we think readers should be wary of.
3. The police blotter approach to writing is a choice. We want to be purely factual. We dont want to try to influence how people feel about a company. Its absolutely a "dragnet approach". The facts and nothing but the facts. As the base of information and our database grows, we dont want people to question the quality of our information.
We dont care if its dry. We want to do our best to make sure its accurate.
We continue to expand our efforts. Hopefully we will publish more. The one certainty however is that we will publish no story before we think we have it right.
We are under no pressure to publish quantity. As an investor I have a great flow of ideas on the long and short side. Where Chris finds stories worth publishing, he publishes them.
It works.
There is not enough investigative reporters out there. I welcome anyone willing to take a serious look at whats going on. Certainly CNBC and Fox and many others do not.
How odd that the unworthiness of Overstock is just about the only thing that these two people agree upon?
GW has had it in for Sharesleuth from way before the Xethanol exposee and I've never understood exactly why myself?
Financial journalists tout doomed fraud stocks all the time, (see Bambi Francisco and the second iteration of the Buy.Con.) Usually for no renumeration above and beyond their salaries. Yet the idea the idea of reportage in the opposite direction for financial gain, (plus the further gains from the stocks that MC shorts and doesn't actually target on the website, a bit of lagniappe that I long suspected,) that notion has historically been recieved just like a swarm of killer bees chez Gary Weiss?
IMO there is room out there for three or four more Sharesleuths, five more Chris Byrons and five more Gary Weiss voices as well. The faster that these utterly hopeless scam stocks get vommited right off the major exchanges, the better for all concerned.
So if the Sharesleuth model is what it takes to make that happen, then I say "so what?" It's not as if the SEC will address the matter anyway. The most they usually accomplish is getting the offender to promise not to do it again?
Some people stronlgy disagree with you. And you're starting to sound a bit petty.
http://www.poynter.org/column.as...d=31&
aid=162398
Mr. Weiss, I beg to differ with you with respect to Sharesleuth.com. I find it to be a worthy endeavor and am gratified Mr. Cuban's no longer shorting companies which are exposed by Mr. Carey.
Mr. Boyd at the New York Post did a nice job exposing a few micro-cap scams in his tenure as well. Three execs from one of them (Conversion Solutions Holdings) just got indicted by the US Attorney's office in Atlanta. Am surprised you missed this news, Mr. Weiss.
I also found reading Mr. Boyd worthwhile. Where is he now ?
Chris Carey certainly does good research. But the dry style makes it hard to digest and I don't read Sharesleuth often.If the intended audience is reporters then the business model is an issue, if only because journalists react negatively to it.
I do not see Mr. Weiss' point. Positive reports/articles are written all the time about stocks - with the authors admitting having a long position in the stocks mentioned. (Examples are all over the Internet - and the research reports from brokerage firms).
Does Mr. Weiss have a problems with that, too?
If not, why the bias against critical reports?
Frankly there is too little critical commentary out there. Anything we can get is appreciated. As long as the authors admit they are short, let the reader judge the merit of the information. As many courts around the country have noted - let the critics exercise their First Amendment rights - then let the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
I'm a great believer in critical reports. I just don't like seeing people trade in advance of "journalism," as that makes it something other than journalism.
Actually I'm glad that Cuban has been able to support this venture by something other than trading in advance of publication of sharesleuth's reports. However, if he is employing people holding themselves out as journalists, who may or may not publish their findings -- which may be used for trading by Cuban -- then that compromises the journalistic status of whoever is doing the research.
If you're carrying out research it's one thing, if you're doing so as journalism it's another. Both are fine when carried out separately. You shouldn't mix them, any more than you can mix journalism with working for the CIA.
Fortunately sharesleuth has not turned out to be a major issue, because nobody else has picked up on this "business model."
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