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Guides BETA: Found a bug?
User:HannibalMsg: 7655 of 7655 5/28/2007 2:55:12 AM Recs: 0 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7653 by tamoshanter Re: Finally, we agree on something My eyes! My eyes! Just kidding. If InvestorVillage has a way of logging one in automatically, I wish someone would let me know. Occasionally I visit and, prior to logging in, start clicking through postings in order. When that happens, then messages of those I set to filter out pop up before me, and I find myself torn between ignoring them after the fact, or revealing their foolishness. So it is with Tam tonight. Since some of his quetions are borderline reasonable, I'll answer them in CAPS (meant not to denote shouting, but simply used as to set my type apart from his). "Hey, Dr. Cellophane, glad to see ya! I had some questions for the World's Most Transparent CEO: How much was Bagley and entities related to him paid by Overstock before he came on board as director of social media?" HEY TAM - THE ANSWER TO THAT IS "$0." What are the names of the people at Overstock who help him with his work at ASM? TAM - THE ANSWER IS "NO ONE."
I DON'T KNOW WHO "PHIL SAUNDERS" IS. I KNOW THAT SOME THINK IT IS BOB O'BRIEN. NOT ONLY DON'T I KNOW THAT, I HAVE SOME REASON TO DOUBT IT IS TRUE. IN ANY CASE, I DON'T PAY BOBO ANYTHING. I DON'T USE PRIVATE EYES. WE DO USE SOME SECURITY FIRMS FOR PHYSICAL SECURITY. How much was paid to the National Assn. Against Naked Shortselling?: A COUPLE YEARS AGO I DONATED AROUND $75K TO NCANS (I ASSUME THAT IS WHAT YOU MEAN?) BUT BOBO USED THAT TO BUY AN AD IN THE WASHINGTON POST SO I DO NOT THINK OF THAT AS A "PAYMENT" TO BOBO. IF INSTEAD OF NCANS, YOU MEAN ONE OF THE MORE RECENT LOBBYING GROUPS THAT HAVE BEEN SET UP, I MAY HAVE MADE A DONATION BUT DO NOT RECALL IF I DID. When did Bagley become director of communications? JUDD'S TITLE OF "DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL MEDIA" MORPHED TO "DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS" ABOUT A MONTH AGO, BUT HIS DUTIES IN THAT REGARD PROBABLY GO BACK A MONTH OR TWO BEFORE THAT. How come you didn't say in the press release that Ray left because of the prime brokers lawsuit? BECAUSE WE FILED AN 8K AT THE SAME TIME THAT INCLUDED HIS RESIGNATION LETTER, AND FELT IT BEST TO LET THAT SPEAK FOR ITSELF. Any material disagreements with him? IF THERE WERE WE WOULD HAVE DISCLOSED THEM. Other than the prime broker stuff, was Ray upset about anything related to Overstock or you? Why did he quit now? What happened since February to make him quit? SORRY, ALL SUCH ISSUES DO NOT REQUIRE DISCLOSURE AND ARE BEST LEFT TO THE PRIVACY OF THE BOARD ROOM. Looking forward to your usual rational, non-flip, non-evasive answers (only kidding). ONCE AGAIN, TAM, I DO NOT SEE WHY ANYONE COULD SEE THESE ANSWERS AS LESS THAN FORTHCOMING, OR AS FLIP OR EVASIVE. BUT I KNOW YOU GUYS HAVE A GOAL OF JUST REPEATING LIES OFTEN ENOUGH, SO I HAVE NO DOUBT YOU WILL CONTINUE. PATRICK
I have always been proud of one piece of work, the link to which was thoughtfully reposted recently by Floydonwall (as Judd calls him): http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm?g=44423891-cfd7-45a0-8513-02cd7aebd4d2&f=rss34 Check it out. Patrick
Msg: 7528 of 7655 5/23/2007 12:02:10 AM Recs: 12 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7513 by truthshines Re: The Stage of Circumlocution, and Answer for Tam Hi Truthshines. This was, as someone else has suggested, just a joke of mine. I was trying to imagine the instructions that could have been given to a reporter to write an article such as the one to which I linked. Read it and see if it does not read as though someone was issued those instructions. In reality, of course, I think no such "insructions" were issued: journalists internalize such rules within the corproation for which they work (just ask them about it, as most have stories). _____Tam asked me two accusatory questions, only one of which I remember (and I don't want to sign out in order to see it again). It had to do with why we were so "shy" about announcing it Judd's hiring date as Director. _____Tam, the answer is that we were not "shy" about it so much as we have about 15-20 people with the "Director" title, and we do not announce when we hire to that level, nor to the one above it (VP), nor generally, SVP, I think. I recall we even made some C-level changes here and there without great mid-quarter fanfare. _____That said, I'll happily fill in the gaps here. Judd interviewed me in December of 2005. He did three podcasts that you can find on businessjive.com. The interview was not about the Miztvah per se, but it went there. He became intrigued and started studying this stuff (and allowed me to post "Darkside" on his site). Over 8-9 months of 2006 we had occasional phone calls where he simultaneously educated me about social media, and periodically disclosed what his sleuthing was turning up in terms of unseemly releationships among journalists, hedge funds, and paid bashers. A particularly fascinating aspect of his work was his deconstruction of how areas of social media were getting hijacked by teams of people who seemed to be coordinating their efforts. This led him to sell me on the idea of creating a social media tab within Oveerstock that was innoculated against hijackings. And so was "Omuse" conceived. Judd may have officially joined us in August, 2006, I think, but I don't think he really got going until September. At just the time he started some other people came to me with the beginnings of a car site: I asked Judd to take that project over, and he managed its transition to a tab (albeit it LAMP). Somewhere in November-December he began transitioning that off to someone else as he formed another tiny team and began building Omuse. That came live early this year. _____ Judd decided that those 8 months researching the miscreants' connections and doctrines had yielded fruits that were too juicy simply to discard. So he created Antisocialmedia.net, with the intent of occasionally publishing what he had figured out in those months, namely, that certain journalists had betrayed their professions, at the very least by their subservience to structures of power and authority, but perhaps by being on the take (since Judd proved that Gary was posting from within the DTCC that has appeared a lively possibility). That Judd was behind ASM was completley unknown to me at first, but I came to realize Judd was at least contributing, and then, in time, that he was largely behind it (I do not the ownership structure of ASM and who else is involved). _____ Of course, the usual journalist-cronies have responded to ASM with intense braying about how unseemly it is to have anyone investigate them and the media corporations for which they work. I have sat back in enjoyment watching them prove Judd's point for him. _____ Yes, now I remember Tan's other question concerned a claim that ethical rules were possibly being violated. As is Tam's style, no evidence or argument was adduced to support his claim, and I have no idea why he would think that there would be anything unethical about unmasking crooks. And in any case, I am quite proud of my efforts and Judd's work in tht regard. Patrick
Msg: 7500 of 7655 5/22/2007 1:15:21 AM Recs: 33 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites The Stage of Circumlocution Wow. This is wild. "INSTRUCTIONS: You are to write an article about criminals manipulating stock markets on an international scale. However, under no circumstances will you mention 'naked shorting' or even 'shorting.' Instead, refer to 'puts,' even if you have to write some terribly awkward sentence like, 'A... scenario in which terrorists buy millions of dollars of put options and blow up buildings or airplanes to increase the puts' value....' In addition, you will not say anything negative about hedge funds. Actually, we'd prefer if you don't mention them. If you must, just refer to 'substantial liquidity pools." Really wild. "First they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. Then they circumlocute."
=====================================================Prior to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, suspicious trading of puts was spotted in American and United airlines. There was similarly suspicious trading in Europe in insurance-company stocks. U.S. intelligence agencies determined that portfolio managers coincidentally initiated the trades before al Qaeda's attack. But it is now evident that the intelligence community regularly monitors the markets for terrorists. And the trend toward merging exchanges across national boundaries presents opportunities for greater regulatory enforcement in global markets. A "JAMES BOND SCENARIO" IN WHICH terrorists buy millions of dollars of put options and blow up buildings or airplanes to increase the puts' value is deemed unlikely by intelligence authorities. Yet less developed securities markets have reported stock trading by terrorists to raise money. In February, India's national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, said at a security-policy conference in Munich that India had evidence of "isolated incidents of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations." Cox would not say if terrorists were active, or present, in U.S. markets. But he was clear about the reason for this increased illegal activity in global markets.
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Hannibal is, indeed, I. If you ever really wonder, just email me (patrick@overstock.com). I am not going to interpret your question in a Randian sense. If that is the sense in which you intended it, please let me know and I will reply differently. For now, I am just going to assume that you are a newcomer, and that being the case, inform you of matters of which you should be forewarned: 1) I visit sporadically, but most times (50%?) I visit, I do post. Sometimes I do not visit for a month or two at a time. Today, because Roddy Boyd of the New York Post sent me someone's message for comment, I came to the board from my office at work. I found your message, and am now replying. Other than that, I do not recall ever posting from work. 2) There are numerous hedge fund choagies who have clogged Yahoo!'s board to the point of being meaningless. They tried the same here, but the good authorities of Investestor Village spotted them and put them in a box. The choagies threatened to sue (that whole episode would be an extraordinary story for someone to recreate). Anyway, they faded for awhile, but now they are back at it with a vengeance, because the bad guys are nervous (I believe they understand what is happening). 3) I keep most of them on "Ignore" and so they become invisible, but ask that good people here, when they see anything worth replying to, quote it in one of their messages. 4) In a similar vein, when something good is posted and they try to clog so it rolls off the screen, I ask that people occasionally repost it to keep it above the fold. I did that the other day with my "Gotterdammerung" essay, which I thought was worth replaying for all. But feel free to do that with mine or any other meaningful posts. 5) When I don't post, the bad guys suggest that is is proof that they are right. When I do post, they also take it as proof that they must be right. When I don't post for a long time and then I do post, they take it as evidence of... well, whatever their accusation du jour is. 6) About what do they believe they are right? As far as I am concerned, their arguments are endless picking of nits over trivial details salted with fabrications and half-truths. Off-hand I cannot recall a single substantive argument (but then again, since they are on "Ignore" I don't see much of them anymore). 7) The really Establishment ones take offense that I am even here at all. No one would object to a CEO going to Wall Street and meeting privately with hedge fund managers behind closed doors, but somehow, being out in the open, and talking to the public on a message board that all investors can read, causes grave offense, and is sure evidence of.... well, again, whatever their accusation du jour is. 8) Be aware that there are more bad posters than bad guys: that is, they sock-puppet like mad. There is a site, antisocialmedia.net which documents and exposes how they work. ASM (as it is known) is managed, or at least has as its prime contributor, Judd Bagely, a reporter turned political PR guy turned Web 2.0 blogger, entrepeneur, and investigator. I grew so impressed by Judd that I hired him to create what has become our Car tab, and Omuse (around the time he joined us he, without telling me, created ASM to publish the results of his months spent piecing their network together, so all his months of work would not be lost: of course, the miscreants try to use that as evidence of.... well, at this point you can fill in the blanks). 9) By the way, at the fringes of the system that we are trying to expose there are some who realize that enough is enough, and out of disgust with their own, fear of the future, or simple patriotism, have started to help us. Recently I was contacted by someone who turned over a tremendous treasure trove of documentation and communications among the bad guys, including message board posters, convicted stock cheats, and bent journalists. It has given someone close to me a new hobby, and has been tremendously rewarding, to learn more of matters about which we could previoulsy only surmise. In time, of course, I will make this Rosetta Stone available to the public. If you want to support me, do me a favor and shop Overstock! Ask your friends to as well. In addition, I would love any readers of this to go into our new Cars and Omuse tab and give me some constructive feedback, here on this board. Really, I would love sensible feedback. remember that they are works in progress. Patrick
Last May I received two subpoenas: between the two I was in contact with the SEC, and between the two I put out a press release where I said, "I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena." When I wrote that, was my imbedded claim ("that I had been subpoenaed") true or false? _____You would say that it was true, if you believe (as I do) that the distinction between "being subpoenaed" and "being CEO of a company that is subpoenaed in part about things you have said and done" is a distinction without a difference: however, if you choose this horn of the dilemma, then it means that you acknowledge that I was subpoenaed and then disclosed it. _____On the other hand, if you want to insist that I was subpoenaed but did not disclose it, you have to claim, then, that when I wrote, "I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena" I was not telling the truth because I had NOT been subpoenaed: to maintain this, however, you have to insist that the distinction between "being subpoenaed" and "being CEO of a company that is subpoenaed in part about things you have said and done" is really a solid, well-founded distinction. Are the miscreants, in their eagerness to prosecute their J'accuse du jour, in fact willing to choose this second horn? If so, then I have two replies. The first is that this is a patently silly distinction. The second is, it leaves them defending a belief system that says that when I am subpoenaed I hide it from the world, but when I am not subpoenaed I like to pretend to the world that I am being subpoenaed, and that I happened to be engaging in just such a pretense precisely when I actually WAS subpoenaed. If this is, in fact, the belief system they choose to defend, then... well, I wish them all the best, and beg them to elaborate. Bored in Utah, Patrick PS By the way, as I recall (it has been a year), that second subpoena was quite short, had two questions that related to areas covered by the first (I do not remember what, precisely), a third that asked if I had a 10b5 plan ("No"), and then asked for everything I had written, gathered, learned and said about the miscreants: naked shorting, collusive and manipulative practices among hedge funds, analysts, bent journalists, etc. So, given that I had just issued a press release saying, "I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena," I can honestly say that I do not think it even occured to me that another press release was due: if it had, I probably would have put out one that said, "Overstock Celebrates Subpoena Indicating The SEC May Finally Be Looking Into Claims About Corruption in Our Capital Markets." PPS If one of the guys whom we mostly ignore manages to make interesting reply, someone please repost it so I will see.
Msg: 7305 of 7655 5/13/2007 12:28:36 AM Recs: 2 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7301 by stockperson Re: Why is the obvious so necessary to state? ""'SALT LAKE CITY, May 9, 2006 /PRNewswire Overstock.com Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne said, 'I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena.'" The subpoena of you was on May 17. Why didn't you celebrate that subpoena? Why didn't you disclose it?" I'm not up on my Emily Post: how many times does one celebrate subpoena-receiving? Patrick
Re: Why is the obvious so necessary to state? "Answer the question, punk." Hahaha. Wow, did Tam really say that? Hilarious. Laughable, and hilarious. "Only a coward threatens when he is safe." - Goethe, I think. Please, folks, feel free to post that kind of stuff again so I will see it. Laughs are good. If they give any good answer to my point about squaring my announcement of last May with their attempt to claim .... well, whatever iteration of their charges they are trying to claim this hour, please, someone let me know. Patrick SALT LAKE CITY, May 9, 2006 /PRNewswire Overstock.com Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne said, "I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena."
Msg: 7289 of 7655 5/12/2007 7:11:23 PM Recs: 15 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Why is the obvious so necessary to state? ______I suppose I should remember to sign in immediately as Hannibal when I come, so the guys whom I have set to “Ignore” never make it to my screen. There is one advantage in my forgetting to do so, however, and that is that I get an occasional glimpse of the daily party line over which the miscreants are frothing. It really is getting pretty wild, isn’t it? ______Here is Tamoshanter crying about Judd: “Think about it. He allows an employee like you to use fully his "free speech rights" to run a website attacking all of his personal enemies! He has the clearness of purpose to let you stalk and harass anyone who criticizes him. And you! Why, you've got the guts to kiss his ass right here on a message board!” ______At least Tamoshanter has cleared up one thing for me. I was beginning to wonder if he had the grey matter to process my claims. It appears he does, as in the quote above he was able to recreate them accurately, albeit it with a consistent error. You know, of course, that my claim is that there is an Establishment of powerful, wealthy Wall Street Elites whose ownership of the financial press is used both to manipulate stocks to the benefit of the hedge funds and prime brokers, and stalk, harass, and attack anyone who tries to expose their game. Their compliant financial press does their bidding, sucking up to the hedgies by running glowing articles about their latest acquisition of a $45 million penthouse or an $8 million stuffed shark. Tam seems to understand the architecture of the argument, but substituted me in for the Establishment, and Judd’s small website in for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, Fortune, etc. _____Like many of them these days, Tam is in hysterics that another message is beginning to get to the public, a message that bypasses the mass media: Judd has created a website that exposes their lies and collusions, with articles that are better researched, more thoroughly documented, and in general adhere to a higher journalistic standard, than the swill they mass produce, and this tiny crack in their power and authority seems to be driving them nuts. One feels almost that back in Operations where these things are scheduled someone has made an error, and mistakenly pressed the button on two months of mass-produced identical hatchet jobs and they have all spitting out of the machine at once. _____The claims they are making are so silly as to be unworthy of response, other than to demonstrate my point about trying to overwhelm simple truth with mass produced lies:
“Overstock.com Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne said, ‘I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena.’” http://investors.overstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=131091&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=858248&highlight= Now read the quotes Tam adduces from such luminaries as: Herb Greenberg of MarketWatch asks: Why did Byrne wait nearly one full year to disclose that he, too, had received a subpoena? Roddy Boyd of the New York Post writes: An SEC attorney told The Post that while such disclosures should be made “promptly,” there was little chance that his actions would get him in trouble. A former enforcement chief echoed this sentiment, adding, “If [the SEC] is looking at you, there [are] bigger fish to fry.” [Really? When Jim, Herb and all the gang received theirs, did that indicate there were “bigger fish to fry”? – Patrick] For his part, Byrne suggested in a blog posting on the Overstock Web site that inquiries about the delay in disclosing the subpoena’s existence was further proof of the unethical connection between journalists and short-selling hedge funds. [Yes, imagine that: having opened a press release with the words, “‘I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena,” it does, in fact, seem a bit strange to be accused of being non-forthcoming on this subject, and it raise questions regarding motives and connections. How odd of me. - Patrick] Floyd Norris of the New York Times also asked Byrne about the subpoena, and his comments include: …. Mr. Byrne says he has talked about the subpoenas in the past… [If by “talked about the subpoenas in the past” Floyd is referring to that time I said, ““‘I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena,” then he has left unexplained how exactly he thinks this cover-up is working.] Investigative journalist and Forbes.com writer Gary Weiss notes …. I think it’s reasonable to suggest that an SEC subpoena received by Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock, is both a legal/regulatory matter as well as a material fact. [Well I’m not completely sure about some of that: for example, do the thousand or so documents and communications from certain of folks that have been recently turned over to me (quite lawfully), or the fact that the SEC wants them, count as “material fact[s]” vis a vis Overstock? That’s a toughie. Anyway, once again, how my opening a press release with the words, “I may be the first CEO in history to celebrate receiving an SEC subpoena” squares with their flailing claims is so recondite a matter that Gary, like all the others, does nothing but gloss over it.] Tam to me: “I know, you don't want people to know you're up to your ass in hedge funds”: As I say often, there is nothing wrong with hedge funds per se, what I ran was not a hedge fund, and my brother did run a hedge fund but now he runs an insurance company. When Tam rants like this he is just hoping that no one will find the dozens of places I have discussed this stuff. Send word back, Tam, it’s getting sloppy. _____Tam (or someone Tam is quoting, but I’m not sure), says, “I bet Patrick wishes we’d all stop asking so many questions.” _____Not at all, in fact, it's just the opposite: I want you fellows to go on and on and on with this. Keep raising the stakes. I have all the confidence of Twain’s proverbial “Methodist minister with four aces,” and I am enjoying putting my credibility on the line against the credibility of The NY Post (ahem), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, etc. I'm enjoying watching these publications go all in trying to keep a lid on this one. Not simply because they're making one heck of a pot for me to win (though there's that, too,) but because, well... look up "Gotterdammerung" if the joke has not hit you yet. _____So I say, keep at it, raise away. Please. Go for it. You're almost there. Really, Patrick
Msg: 7284 of 7655 5/12/2007 2:23:26 PM Recs: 9 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7279 by blackbartpo8 Re: The New York Times Hey Blackbart: "Send your complaints about the co-opted articles that Joe Nocera and Floyd Norris continue to fabricate to: Byron Calame public@nytimes.com http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/"
You have a great idea there that I heartily endorse. I should tell you that I suspect that the rot goes so deep it is beyond the power of the Ombudsmen to confront. For example, a Wall Street Journal reporter (Holman jenkins) once fabricated a quote for me. He didn't just twist, distort, or take out of context: he simply never spoke to me, then made up a quote for me. The WSJ refrained from publishing my reply, refrained from publishing a retraction and, in fact, refused to reply to an email on the subject. That said, I suggest you take a moment and send them emails at public@nytimes.com and http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/ . Post them here (along with any responses). Patrick
Msg: 7278 of 7655 5/12/2007 9:30:50 AM Recs: 14 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7273 by ScipioAfricanus Re: Gotterdammerung of the American mainstream media I made the mistake of checking replies without signing in, and I saw this witticism from Scipio. My eyes! My eyes! "That would seem to be quite a misleading statement if untrue. Do you want to re-phrase that?" Most untrue statements ARE misleading, Scipio. That's what's "misleading" about them, that fact that their untrue. Do you take one or two tautologies with your tea?
Gotterdammerung of the American mainstream media Ha ha - this is a great one. An all-time classic from Joe Nocera, New York Times. Below you will find an email Joe Nocera sent me asking for my "reaction" to some odd claims he wanted to include in his weekly column. Alas, he sent the email Friday afternoon at 12:11 PM his time (note the "10:11 AM" time stamp of our email system, which is in Salt Lake City, that is to say, Rocky Mountain Time) and, as I was in Texas this afternoon in a meeting, I missed the window of a few hours that I theoretically had been offered to respond before Joe's deadline for his weekly column. Congratulations are due Joe, who has crossed a line never previously crossed (not even by Carol!) by those engaged in their desperate efforts to keep the wig in place. ===========================================Original Message----- From: Joe Nocera [1] Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 10:11 AM To: Patrick Byrne Subject: david rocker patrick-- David Rocker made a speech a couple of weeks ago in which he said, among other things, that your lawsuit was nothing mroe (sic) than an effort to silence critics. He also said that Gradient did its first report about Overstock a year before Rocker Partners even became a client. And he said that Mr. Anafantis (sp?) has been discredited with the SEC's "no action" letter. Your reaction? -- Joe Nocera XXXX YYYY nocera@nytimes.com ======================================Had Joe actually abided by the principles of Ethics in Journalism 101, I would pointed out the numerous flaws in his attempt to whitewash the criminal activity of his friend Rocker with a “Free speech in America is very important” spin. Remember, from the start Rocker’s lawyers have tried to spin his illegal activity as being about free speech, and this is how the argument has been met by the adults who have examined it: 1) On 8 counts versus 0, the trial judge in Marin Country sided with us and against Rocker’s claim that this suit was about free speech. In fact, the judge said in the courtroom that after his initial review of the evidence there was a “high likelihood” that we would win the suit. Rocker appealed. 2) The California Attorney General appeared out of nowhere and filed an amicus with the appellate court supporting our side and against Rocker’s attempt to spin this as about free speech. 3) The appellate court recently heard Rocker’s arguments. This Law.com article gives a good sense of how the appellate court responded to the hysterical attempts by Rocker’s lawyers to spin his illegal conduct as being about free speech. www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1176282246984 The Law.com article captures one judge’s reaction nicely: “Justice Ignazio Ruvolo indicated there was evidence even ‘at this stage of the proceedings’ that could substantiate Overstock.com's claims.” Somehow Joe missed that. I’d also have pointed out that Rocker does not seem to think “Free speech in America is very important” when someone criticizes Rocker: Rocker famously sued some message board posters a few years back for daring to criticize him and his unethical behavior (incidentally, that case got laughed out of town). Free speech doesn’t seem to be THAT important to Rocker, Joe. In the face of these facts, Joe blithely asserts that “The facts are not on Mr. Byrne’s side” without mentioning that the trial court, the California attorney general, and the appellate judge have indicated exactly the opposite, even at this extremely early stage. Joe notes without question that, “Mr. Rocker wasn’t even a client of Gradient when it began writing its tough-minded reports on Overstock,” neglecting to mention that ex-employees of Gradient assert that the firm had a relationship with Rocker even before he formally became a client. Joe writes about his friend Rocker “But you know how lawsuits are: a year and a half later, the thing has barely gotten started” without mentioning that we have been most eager to move forward, but that his friend Rocker has stalled and delayed at every opportunity, rejecting the appellate court’s offer to rule without delay for a hearing: there was even one article where an attorney for the miscreants promised to appeal the appellate court ruling. That is, Joe bemoans the fact that “the thing has barely gotten started” while conveniently neglecting to mention that it is his friend Rocker who is doing everything he can to keep it from getting started. And so on and so forth. Is anyone else noticing that something seems to be going on this week? First, after a year of criticizing me for my decision to issue a press release celebrating my receipt of a subpoena from the SEC, the shills are now trying to make a case that I should have sent out a second press release when I received another addressed to me as a person, though it was a small fraction as long as the first, covered sub-issues of the first, as well as issues related to a broader investigation that is not about me or Overstock at all. As though there is a world of difference between a subpoena addressed to our corporate lawyer asking for our CEO’s materials, and one addressed to me at our corporate address: I hate to disappoint, but that distinction is such a fine one it did not occur to me it was worthy of a second press release. The funny part is how it still has not dawnede on the miscreants that a fair bit of the material being requested by the SEC concerns THEM, not me or Overstock. What would have made them so angry this week? Perhaps they are mad that last Sunday, at an event hosted by The Economist (a publication with infinitely more credibility than Joe, Roddy, Herb, Gary etc. could ever aspire to), the bad guys lost control of the narrative? http://www.cultureproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49 http://cultureproject.org/video2/archivepages/hedge2.html
Can anyone doubt at this point that we are witnessing the Gotterdammerung of the American mainstream media? Patrick
Just checking in here after a long absence, and a cursory glance tells me that the shills are back making noise, hardly worth responding to that I can tell, but there it is. Since I am need nore more than 2.5 seconds of looking at any of their stuff to pick up the gist, and am unwilling to spent more than that reading it, I will practice my customary method of giving short answers that the honest guys here can use in responding to their twaddle as they see fit. From a glance, it seems that the elements of the party line that they are flogging is that I am a bad guy because: I post here, I do not post here, something about inventory, and something about the SEC subpoena that I simultaneously crowed about in a press release while taking steps to hide (if they are to be believed). So, in order: the bad guys who complain that I occasionally drop by and post here ought to fight it out with the bad guys who complain that I rarely drop by to answer their twaddle. (Of course, it could be that they already know each other, or even, that they even use the same computer, in which case it may turn out, as Gary Weiss once tried to explain, that it was his uncle and cousin variously using his computer without letting him know). Inventory: our inventory has conservative reserves against it, the calculation is thoroughly reviewed by PriceWaterhouse every quarter, and in fact I think the reserves are really ample. The full story on that SEC stuff that I have been hiding by celebrating it publicly for a year can be read here: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=17289&sid=30eab0e680ab394832d08efd53e23b4e That should take care of them for now. See you guys in another month or so. Keep up the good fight. Illegitimi non carborundum and all that. Patrick
Msg: 7024 of 7655 4/23/2007 12:33:02 AM Recs: 15 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7023 by tamoshanter Re: Securities Laws "So is it your story now that you had no basis for your statement on March 12, 2006 when you posted on Motley Fool: 'PPS Big story breaking next 24 hours. Stay tuned.'" No, Tam, I was referring to a story that was not about Overstock (I was surprised by Alsin's story and its effect). And in fact, I posted that in a message as soon as I saw what transpired. Odd that you don't quote from that one. This ongoing juvenile ("So it is your story now") deliberate misunderstanding of simple English in an attempt to distort the record and confuse the reader is why I think you are a shill. The rest of your questions just continue the blather laced with false assumptions: Judd was not an "official" (sic) of our company, he worked up antisocialmedia.net's materials months before we hired him, I did not know anything about antisocialmedia.net until I started hearing from people about it, antisocialmedia.net is not about overstock and is not "dedicated to smearing [our] critics", it is investigative journalism that exposes bent reporters and the corruption of social media by shills (with, I think, comparatively little mention of Overstock), employees do plenty of things that are legal that I do not know about, etc. etc. So readers can form their own answers (mutatis mutandis) from my first above. Really, someone needs to write you guys a new script. Send word. You are on "Ignore." I knew I forgot something on my last visit. Patrick
_____Sorry to disappoint, Tam, but Mr. Alsin does not keep me advised of his publication schedule. I'm pretty sure I was as surprised as anyone else when his story ran, and while from my few interactions with him I hold him in very high regard, I don't think that I would have anticipated one of his columns as a "big story" in any case. I recall that long ago I disclosed what it was that I was referring to, right Tam? For a hobbyist you seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything I have ever said or written, so do share with others. _____As far as "valuation" goes: the way some fellows avoid the arguments with rote-like predictability is one of the many things that suggest they are on script. On the off-chance that someone else were inclined to take this point seriously, I will answer it again. The valuation for any stock should be whatever the market says, not "whatever the market says, and one side gets to print up untold quantities of fake shares with which to flood the market for indefinite periods." Now is that distinction really so arcane? _____Lastly, I actually care a great deal about the securities law. In fact, what drives me to act in a fashion some think unconventional is that I believe the "conventions" mask widespread disregard for securities laws within the Elite and to the detriment of the retail investor. _____For example, the "conventional" IPO (circa 2000, anyway) built up demand (much of it misstated or insincere) for shares so as to guarantee a pop once trading began, then allocated to crony hedge funds those IPO shares (with their latent guaranteed profit). Those hedge funds reaped megaprofits at the expense of retail investors, and then paid 30% - 50% kick-backs to the bankers in the form of excess trading commissions. That is the "convention" that I disregarded in order to go with Hambrecht's Dutch Auction. _____For another example, consider Reg FD ("Full Disclosure"). I love FD. I think it was terrible that companies could tell Wall Street one thing while keeping the public in the dark, creating an information asymmetry that the traders could exploit. Just more guaranteed profit coming out of the American public's wallet. However, my sense of things (back when I spent some time around Wall Street) was very much that when the door closed, people still expected the inside scoop. Simply from the way people asked me questions, and met my "Reg FD" reminders with vibes of shock and disbelief (most seemed to think at first that I was kidding), I got the feeling that the "convention" was to leave Reg FD at the hedge fund door. I ignore that convention (if convention it be) and instead openly discuss the company only on public conference calls, public letters, and (to a small extent) on IV, our auction boards, and (until it got captured) Fool. Some squawk about how "unconventional" this is (which I don't understand), but if it is, that is because "the convention" stinks. If all management discussions took place on public message boards and public conference calls we'd have a cleaner market for it (as long as they were stripped of cloggers, of course).
Warm regards, Even to the blackguards, PB PS In case you missed it, here was an interesting article (but not a "big story", Tam): http://www.law.com/jsp/ihc/PubArticleIHC.jsp?id=1176282249576 PPS Now here was a "big story": http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.htm?T=default&clipSRC=mms://media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vIrfhgQPAJ1s.asf
Msg: 7014 of 7655 4/22/2007 12:26:17 AM Recs: 13 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 7012 by rezurch Re: Where is our beloved Dr. Cellophane? Thanks Rezurch. It seems that when I don't post it is proof of something foul, say some, and when I do that is proof of some other evil, say others. Or...maybe they aren't even others (who knows?) Or... maybe sometimes I am traveling for weeks and don't feel it absolutely necessary to check in every single day to read what new old questions Sam has posted over and over and over that day. And besides, it is, in fact, quiet period. Hope you are all well (even you miscreants), Patrick
Msg: 5609 of 7655 3/17/2007 11:57:52 AM Recs: 17 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Howdy - The Worm Has Turned Dear Colleagues, Believe it or not, I have been out of the country since Sunday (still am) and suffering under a terribly slow Internet hook-up. I misseed most of the excitement, but followed what I could from this board. Thanks to all for keeping me informed. One thing that is clear is that anytime there are significant messages the dopes run the doggerel in an attempt to mke it scroll of the screen. So just to make it difficult for them, I sugget we keep reposting that link to Bloomberg: it should be the price of aadmission to get in here. Out of respect to Bloomberg, who had the guts to do it (my baud rate was so slow the download was torture), I think we ought to give preferential linking to Bloomberg. Only as a back-up should people post the Youtube link. Still, after viewing it on Bloomberg, go to YouTube and comment on what you thought. Selene - if you get a chance, email me and tell me more. You know my email (patrick@overstock.com). Patrick
Re: Deleting Posts "Hilarious dissembling and waltzing little princess. Way to not get personal! You remind me of the Ottoman period: bereft of culture, full of incompetence, empty-headed conformity, and lots of spine and tooth-less bullying. Meanwhile, outside the Ottoman territory, the enlightened world sparkled with creativity and invention, got rich, and got smarter and smarter." Rashomon, I will speak up on behalf of many to say: I think you are being racist here. It is disgusting that you cannot debate Evren (a Turk) without bringing up his ethnic origins. It is, however, a fine indication of your general intellectual abilities. Can you give the H. R. Perot stutter? "N-n-now you people, you people...." Sincerely, Patrick M. Byrne A. K. A. "Hannibal"
Msg: 5334 of 7655 3/6/2007 8:47:32 PM Recs: 13 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 5311 by wilburonefor4 Re: Symmetry in Shadow You may have missed this: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=16669&sid=af6abce98a0d5b3894ee32e0e30ab461 "... you are speaking from a 1.0 paradigm in which there are two competing sets of agents: 'corporations' and 'members of the media.' In my worldview there are also two competing sets of agents: 'citizen-journalists exposing a financial scandal,' and 'corporations and their employees whose involvement in this scandal is being exposed.' That some of those corporations happen to be media corporations, and their employees, reporters, neither alters that basic landscape nor makes it incomprehensible." Patrick
Re: Gary is available for comment "Grudge"? I don't hold any grudges. For grudges, I would look to those who spend their days obsessively laboring over message boards and blogs spouting non sequitors and senseless questions in a futile attempt to drown out exposure. THAT looks like "grudge" to me.
Re: About AntiSocialMedia.net "My question for 'Hannibal' was whether he would go on the record in his own voice saying ASM's allegations, about me and others, are truthful." I don;t recall any posting on ASM about DarlJDummont. Did I miss one? Or are you saying that you are one of the people discussed there? Patrick
Re: About AntiSocialMedia.net Maldoror, "Yellowbelly" is not archaic, though it is, arguably, antiquated. "A squish" is a neologism. Neither is (as you suggest) a synonym for "liar" (which is pedestrian). My "personal reality" is composed of things called, "facts" (as in, "A man promised to do X then did not-X"). Patrick
Msg: 5236 of 7655 3/4/2007 1:30:11 PM Recs: 2 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites About AntiSocialMedia.net The unique strength of social media (another term for peer-generated, web-distributed content) is also its unique weakness: the fact that anybody can get involved. AntiSocialMedia.Net seeks to hold accountable those who abuse the power of social media for personal gain. Our mandate is broad but our scope, as you’ll read, is less so: focusing primarily on the use of social media as a tool in support of illegal stock manipulation efforts. The principal editor of this website is employed by one of the many companies mentioned in these pages, but is not a shareholder and receives no support whatsoever from his employer. Please use the comment feature or email to submit tips or additional information.
Re: kudos to IV version 2 Dear OSTK Partner, Howdy. While your congratulations are accepted warmly, and I reciprocate if you are in fact seeing growth like this, I remind you (as I recall I tried to do a year or two ago) that I would prefer you not disclosing such details in public. You may disregard me, of course: I suspect I have no legal way to stop you. Free country and all that. I would expect that there is some term in our partner agreement that you signed that commits you not to disclose details like that, but I do not want to get all legalistic about it. I am simply asking you, as a favor, respectfully, please refrain from disclosing things like this in public until we announce our own earnings. Yes, I know some partners are seeing such growth; I know of at least one who is seeing more; I know others are seeing less. But if the public gets the wrong idea from your release of what is, after all, just one piece of the puzzle, it's not fair to them. Again, I know you are just trying to help, and I thank you for your support. I may not any right to require you not to disclose such information, , even if I knew who you were. So I am just asking, go easy on disclosing numbers like that, please. Respectfully requested, Patrick
Msg: 5014 of 7655 2/22/2007 1:45:49 AM Recs: 1 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 5001 by evren Re: Update "Sam has been booted permanently for posting the letter from the IV attorney on Yahoo (also now deleted by Yahoo) and attacking IV instead of responding to their attempt to reach a compromise. How do I know? Because this time he posted the new letter from the attorney, phone numbers and all, on Gary Weiss's blog comments. Anyway, good riddance and I hope to never mention him again in a post. Evren" Inshallah, Pal.
Re: So that pipsqueak Susan Antilla has written her article Evren, Sorry you have to put up with racists, dude. Put them on "ignore." Patrick
I notified some people of Omuse a couple-few weeks ago. We had not yet turned the tab on, and one had to know the Omuse.overstock.com URL to get there. Its proper use was not really obvious. This week we made some enhancements to make its use much clearer, rolled them out, and turned the tab on. Would love it if you would go there and give it a try. Here are the guides that have been created so far: http://omuse.overstock.com/wiki/Special:Allpages Here is a sample of good, extensive guides: http://omuse.overstock.com/wiki/Properly_Handling_and_Storing_Your_Coin_Collection http://omuse.overstock.com/wiki/Maintaining_a_Home_Computer%27s_Hard_Drive You do not have to do something so extensive: you can also simply outline a guide for others to fill in: http://omuse.overstock.com/wiki/Pitching_A_Knuckleball If you get a chance, I'd love it if you could give it a try.Regards, Patrick
Re: Sam says..... Hi Folks, As I write, my previous post ( http://www1.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3532&mn=4463&pt=msg&mid=1360081 ) has collected 56 recommendations, far more than the 20 I figured would be a satisfactory indicator of support for my position. That is not a "solicitation" to ignore so much as it is a taking of the temperature of folks here: do they share my perception that yours posts are inane clogging? Seems like they do. You are here demanding answers. I type answers, not to everything (who knows how many dozens of random and inane questions you asked, but I answered the main themes). Then you criticize me on Yahoo for answering questions. Then you criticize me here again for not answering enough. Etc. etc. Seems like clogging to me. I asked to find out if anyone else sees it the same way, and I got more recs than I ever saw on this board. Sorry, Sam, on "Ignore" you remain. Probably for a lot more people than just me. It seems you cannot handle exposure. Patrick
Re: Sam says..... Hey Blackbart, I laughed so hard at your message that I had to go back and read enough of Ignored Sam's messages to see what he was saying. It seems that his whole shtick now is that no one will answer his questions so he must have a point (instead of, for example, reading it that he is inane). I have been directed to this message from Sam on yahoo today: ===================Re: This should be very interesting (1 Rating) 2-Feb-07 05:35 pm Re: "His laywers are doing the suing, he and several other people are running Overstock.' Comment: Does running Overstock.com include answering questions posed by me to Judd Bagley about Judd's actions that Patrick Byrne says has nothing to do with Overstock.com on an Investor Village message board during the afternoon? Sam E. Antar (former Crazy Eddie CFO & convicted felon) =So let us get this straight: Sam, who seems not to understand that I let weeks or months go by without checking in on this board, and operating under some ill-founded assumption that he is Junior Prosecutor and is owed immediate and full answers from me to any questions he posts here, criticizes me for not answering his inane and repititive questions fully and immediately. It is proof, he claims, that I have something to hide. Then, I take the time to write a bunch of answers for Sam regarding my relationship with Judd. Then, he criticizes me on Yahoo for taking the time to answer his questions about Judd. Then, he comes back here and criticizes me for not answering his questions.... Did I get that right? Is there anyone here who suspects that Sam is just trying to clog, or waste my time, or misdirect this discussion board? If you agree, please recommend this post. If we get over 20, I say that is proof that it is time we all agree to ignore Sam forever. Patrick
Msg: 4310 of 7655 2/1/2007 12:00:30 AM Recs: 17 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 4303 by Maldoror Re: Bumper Stickers For Sale Nothing improper at all about sleuthing for criminals. I do not believe that there was any implied intimdation on Judd's part: I think we have practiced Buddhist tolerance in the face of an incredible amount of intimidation from the miscreants: theirs is the whining of a mugger caught in a jiu-jitsu hold. Also, I do not believe that neutral observers feel as you suggest. Lastly, from the recommendations, it sure looks like our fight has more supporters than detractors. Other than that, good points.
Re: Bumper Stickers For Sale Ouch. Did that really happen to Sam? It is one of those stories I always meant to read up on, but never got the time. If he or Rashomon ever post anything worthwhile, someone please re-post it (I have them on ignore, but admit that there is a logical possibility that someday, they post something worthy of response). Until then, folks, please feel free to use the following responses in replying to any of their blather. I mean it: if they keep typing the same inane questions, over and over again, just copy and paste one of these as my response. You do not even have to give me credit.
2) The Blackguards: Yes, I believe that the pro-NSS has indulged in a great deal of seriously illegal activity. They are raising such a clatter because they know what they are hiding. They know what Judd has figured out. Or, at least they have to wonder about it (they probably do not know all the places they have been sloppy around the 'Net, but they must know by now that they have been sloppy). By the way, all of this is stored in a safe place these days, with lawyers, and with people who could broadcast it independently of us. Dead Man's Switch and all that (or leverage for the day we may need it). In the meantime, watching these guys swing and miss is laughable. Patrick
Re: Judd Bagley admitted to making the following threat online Oh, is Sam saying something? I put him on ignore. Let me exercise my Kreskin-like psychic powers, and guess what Sam is saying: it is an endless string of questions that suggest Judd has, in the act of exposing the X (or if you include Yahoo!, the 100X) in which Sam's cronies have engaged, himself performed .0001X. Sort of like criticizing a guy who uses a prank phone call to catch a mugger. All phrased as polite questions, over and over, in order to clog the board. My psychic powers are letting me see this like...like...like it was yesterday. Regards, Kreskin PS I will now make a prediction. We will see Sammy post something along the lines of, "Mr. Byrne, have you ever tried to hide behind the name, 'Kreskin'?"
Re: To Patrick Byrne and Judd Bagley By way of general response, I will mentioned that I am proud of both mine and Judd's behavior unravelling the charade of miscreants. I always either post as "Patrick" or as "Hannibal" (after the Carthaginian general) but identify myself: http://www1.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3532&mn=155&pt=msg&mid=146514 That will have to do. Did someone give you the idea that you can write endless strings of messages and I have an obligation to take the time to asnwer? Sorry, I don't work for you, fool. Now run along and pester Gary et. al. with the questions, lest your outrage be revealed as selective and thus hypocritical. Speaking of which, Sam: Do you know Gary? Have you ever communicated with gary? Have you ever communicated with Scipio? Have you ever discussed compensation for posting on these boards with them? What were the answers? What were your positions? Have you ever discussed their refusal to identify themselves by their real names? Have you ever discussed with Gary his use of cookies? What did he tell you about it? Do you believe that using cookies is illegal of Gary to do? etc. etc. Patrick
Msg: 4165 of 7655 1/29/2007 4:08:38 PM Recs: 19 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 4163 by onelife1chance Re: A question for Judd Hi. Someone's email brought these thread to my attention. It is obvious that the miscreants go silent when exposed, and then have allies throw out distracting questions that they would never answer themselves (such as Judd's question about Gary Weiss' email that Sam dodges over and over). That said, I can lay some of these to rest (ANSWERS IN CAPS):
Re: Just BS So Byrne and Bagley went to this "Rocky Mountain Voices and PodTech Meet Up on Thursday, October 5, 2006 from 6:00 - 8:30 PM" which was also attended by the CEO of Provo Labs, Paul Allen and you did not even meet him? This is the guy who bought Bagley's company. SO WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WENT TO THAT?
Msg: 3573 of 7655 1/15/2007 12:07:40 AM Recs: 2 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 3571 by ScipioAfricanus Re: Open the window,let out the stench What has gone on here has been neither "corporate," nor "stalking," but it is "cyber" though. 1 out of 3 is not bad for you, Scipio.
Re: JD, is the ASM Site through? "The Arizona suit doesn't appear to be a vulnerable as the Utah suit last year." I assume you mean, as vulerable to challenge on grounds of federal preemption? Yes, the AZ law sure doesn't look vulnerable on those grounds to me, either. I hear rumors that there are more states on the way.
Msg: 3566 of 7655 1/14/2007 11:23:17 PM Recs: 22 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 3453 by ScipioAfricanus Re: Just BS Is Judd Bagley an employee of Overstock.com or is he contracted from some other entity? HE IS AN EMPLOYEE. HE JOINED AT THE VERY END OF AUGUST. Does Provo Labs offer support to AntiSocialMedia.net (either personnel, financial or facilities)? NO IDEA WHO THEY ARE. Does Overstock.com (or Patrick Byrne) have contractual relationship(s) with Provo Labs? NOPE. NEVER HEARD OF THEM. Does Judd Bagley primarily work from Overstock.com facilities? STRANGE GUY, KEEPS HIS OWN HOURS, COMES IN SOME NIGHTS, STAYS AWAY FOR DAYS. HE HAS BEEN LEADING THE DEVELOPMENT EFFORT OF A NEW PROJECT FOR US. IT IS PRETTY COOL: A SOCIAL MEDIA SYSTEM THAT WILL NOT GERMANATE OR HARBOR TYRANTS. THE FIRST I EVER SPOKE WITH JUDD ABOUT ASM IS WHEN I WENT TO TELL HIM ABOUT THIS COOL NEW SITE I HAD FOUND. THAT IS THE SUM TOTAL OF MINE OR OVERSTOCK'S SUPPORT. WHILE I GRADUALLY CAME TO THINK JUDD WAS INVOLVED, HE NEVER ACTUALLY WOULD TELL ME THE TRUTH UNTIL RECENTLY. HOWEVER, NOW THAT JUDD HAS REVEALED HIMSELF, LET ME TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SAY I WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE HIS SLEUTHING AND EXPOSURE OF GARY WEISS AND HIS VARIOUS MANIPULATIONS. AGAIN, YOU GUYS DON'T GET IT. WE CAN ALL TELL FROM THE WAY YOU FOLKS ARE STRANGELY QUIET FOR ONCE, AS YOU PLAN YOUR NEXT PARTY LINE. THE PROBLEM IS, YOUR PARADIGM WILL NOT COMPUTE ON THIS SIMPLE TRUTH: WE ARE THE CITIZEN JOURNALISTS, GARY (& HERB ETC.) ARE THE EVIL CORPORATE GUYS, THE CORPORATIONS THEY WORK FOR HAPPEN TO BE MEDIA CORPORATIONS, AND WE ARE USING THE INTERNET TO BREAK THEIR STRANGEHOLD ON THE PUBLIC'S UNDERSTANDING. IT IS ALL VERY 2.0. BE HAPPY YOU ARE PART OF HISTORY IN THE MAKING.
Re: Just BS Is Judd Bagley an employee of Overstock.com or is he contracted from some other entity? HE IS AN EMPLOYEE. HE JOINED AT THE VERY END OF AUGUST. Does Provo Labs offer support to AntiSocialMedia.net (either personnel, financial or facilities)? NO IDEA WHO THEY ARE. Does Overstock.com (or Patrick Byrne) have contractual relationship(s) with Provo Labs? NOPE. NEVER HEARD OF THEM. Does Judd Bagley primarily work from Overstock.com facilities? STRANGE GUY, KEEPS HIS OWN HOURS, COMES IN SOME NIGHTS, STAYS AWAY FOR DAYS. HE HAS BEEN LEADING THE DEVELOPMENT EFFORT OF A NEW PROJECT FOR US. IT IS PRETTY COOL: A SOCIAL MEDIA SYSTEM THAT WILL NOT GERMANATE OR HARBOR TYRANTS. THE FIRST I EVER SPOKE WITH JUDD ABOUT ASM IS WHEN I WENT TO TELL HIM ABOUT THIS COOL NEW SITE I HAD FOUND. THAT IS THE SUM TOTAL OF MINE OR OVERSTOCK'S SUPPORT. WHILE I GRADUALLY CAME TO THINK JUDD WAS INVOLVED, HE NEVER ACTUALLY WOULD TELL ME THE TRUTH UNTIL RECENTLY. HOWEVER, NOW THAT JUDD HAS REVEALED HIMSELF, LET ME TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SAY I WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE HIS SLEUTHING AND EXPOSURE OF GARY WEISS AND HIS VARIOUS MANIPULATIONS. AGAIN, YOU GUYS DON'T GET IT. WE CAN ALL TELL FROM THE WAY YOU FOLKS ARE STRANGELY QUIET FOR ONCE, AS YOU PLAN YOUR NEXT PARTY LINE. THE PROBLEM IS, YOUR PARADIGM WILL NOT COMPUTE ON THIS SIMPLE TRUTH: WE ARE THE CITIZEN JOURNALISTS, GARY (& HERB ETC.) ARE THE EVIL CORPORATE GUYS, THE CORPORATIONS THEY WORK FOR HAPPEN TO BE MEDIA CORPORATIONS, AND WE ARE USING THE INTERNET TO BREAK THEIR STRANGEHOLD ON THE PUBLIC'S UNDERSTANDING. IT IS ALL VERY 2.0. BE HAPPY YOU ARE PART OF HISTORY IN THE MAKING.
Re: Just BS Evren, Fair points. But from what I know, I suspect that the largest blows to Gary are still to come. You ain't seen nothing. By the way, I have been mostly off-line for a few days, with a couple minutes here and there to catch up. I am reading this drivel now, wondering when someone is going to tell these jokers that they are stuck inside a 1.0 world, which holds, "They are the journalists, Overstock is the corproation, the journ alists are supposed to report on the corporation." In the 2.0 paradigm (which is to say, mine and Judd's) it looks like this: an unhealthy alliance has emerged among certain hedge funds, corporate media, and the corporate media's hedge-fund-shills (who call themselves "reporters"); Judd is a reporter (he was, incidentally, a professional reporter down in Florida, before going to work for Jeb); we work together; we are exposing them; the 1st Amendment applies to us, too. These guys are so arrogant and stupid they cannot yet grasp that they are the targets of an investigation by honest journalists (that would be the rest of us), we are exposing them, and they are twisting around in shrill complaint like the corporate flacks they are. That 2.0 paradigm just has not sunk in: they are not journalists, they are the evil corporations, and we citizens are the journalists. "DOES NOT COMPUTE" for Gary, Seth, etc. One of the most interesting things I have ever seen is watching how these shill-journalists react as the tables get slowly turned on them. Regards, Patrick
Re: Donny Deutsch? No "Al Capone's vault" about this one at all. I did indeed do an interview with Mr. Deutsche today. It was a good interview. We discussed substantive issues, as neither of us bothered much about my lack of popularity with certain journalists (fine by me: that is not the issue that matters). He seems like a mensch. It is up to them to announce scheduling, but when they do, I will let a couple tens of millions of my closest friends know about it with some free advertising for CNBC (odd to think of it, but we have a total of 26 million email addresses). Patrick
Ask Mr. Pink.
Msg: 3022 of 7655 12/25/2006 9:09:30 PM Recs: 3 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Clogging It seems that folks are beginning to notice that Scipio is running about as clos to clogging as one can get. He asserts everything without argument because is has already been proven somewhere else, everything someone else says is "begging the question" etc. etc.
Msg: 3020 of 7655 12/25/2006 9:05:24 PM Recs: 5 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 3015 by ScipioAfricanus Re: Seth Jayson (Motley Fool) Actually, Scipio, this is called, "irony." From your post is not clear that you understand what "begging the question" means. Please point out the place in my post where I assumed what it was that I was trying to prove. Since there is nothing substantive in Scipio's reply (just some name calling, this and this is "bullshit" and "manipulating" and so on and so forth), if I did not know better, I'd say this guy was clogging to try to get some decisive posts to scroll of the screen. Patrick
Re: Seth Jayson (Motley Fool) Riiiight. Six people all living in New York City independently and months (even years) apart decide to go on Amazon and bash the same books and Yahoo the same stocks, and by coincidence they randomly get assigned precisely the same IP on just the days that they do so. Sure, it could be a quadrillion-to-one shot. Or.... it could not be. Let's let the readers decide. I'm mildly curious, and interested in reader's opinions. Scipio has to know that he is just spouting gibberish (the birthday paradox is a basic lesson in any 14 year-old's first exposure to permutations). What is the motive for the clogging? I have yet to see any evidence that such stuff actually converts anyone. So why do they do it? Patrick
Re: Seth Jayson (Motley Fool) I agree. Consider this pattern: a group of miscreants act in concert to pound a Party Line. Their activity is so obvious that even the most casual observer picks up on it. But as the public consciousness begins to recognize it, they pound that nascent realization with rants about paranoid conspiracy theorists, picking of nits on the most unimportant details, and clogging, clogging, clogging. This pattern decribes the behavior of Yahoo, Motley Fool, and what Scipio is trying to do here. Yes, Scipio is right, IP addresses do sometimes change under random assignment, but he skates over the point that antisocialmedia.com makes, that it seems that the same IP got "randomly" assigned to Gary Weiss and then a lot of other people who share the same views on particular stocks at Yahoo, and the same books on Amazon reviews, etc. What are the chances of that really happening? It is such a basic counterpoint that I believe it occurs to everyone who reads his quibbling, and that he knows it occurs to them. Why does he post it, then? He hopes he can drown out discussion on this board as they have elsewhere. Hey, I just took a break from writing this and read the new antisocialmedia.net blog. Don't miss it. http://www.antisocialmedia.net/ This guy posted 2,540 timess in the last year, as many as 55/day, and all against the same three folks who are trying to bring attention to failed trades. Does that sound like a hobby? Remember, these folks are going to do everything they can to prevent that pattern from crystallizing in the public's mind. By the way, Fool used to be pretty good and reasonable. Sometimes they saiad nice things about me, sometimes not, but they were honestly trying to get it right. Then we began to suspect someone in our company of being a mole. After we formed tht suspicion on other grounds, we found that the person was going around trying to discover, "What is the special relationship between Fool and Patrick?" (By which was meant, why were we getting fair coverage from the Fool while all the other business journalists were toeing the party line?) (Incidentally, there was and is no "special relationship" between me and the FOol: I barely knew them, but I liked the Brothers Gardner, and did a few radio interviews with them.) About four weeks after this mole was trying to discover this, the Fool took precisely the turn that Gnomon is describing here, led by Bill Mann and Seth. No better than Yahoo. One wonders, of coursee, if someone got bought up. For example, someone I know drew up a chart of Seth's postings, and it is more or less a perfect picture of the Miscreant's Party Line. Patrick
1) Overstock has no resources supporting antisocialmedia.com. It is someone's hobby. 2) It is interesting to see how quickly the bad guys accuse others of being guilty of misdeeds they (the miscreants) have pioneered. For example, on Yahoo (full disclosure: I visit them essentially never these days, but someone who does has deconstructed the miscreants' system there) they seem to have figured out a way to demote with a one-star any posting they do not like (as most have a default filter set at 3, demoting a post to 1 star is almost as good as a deletion). So for example, there were posts exposing certain of Gary Weiss improprieties: I am told that they got as many as 1-star rating in minutes. It is hard to see how even a band of organized cloggers could do that, unless they had written a script of some sort. This has been going on for a couple months, I am told. Now they are running around accusing others of having a script (could be, don't know, I doubt it, don't care, really don't go there myself, etc). Almost as though they had long ago figured out that way to game the star system..... As far as I can tell, Scipio is doing everything possible to keep you from going to www.antisocialmedia.com or understanding what is being said there, with screen shots and hard proof. Yes, short of having photos of Gary posting under different names, the most we are ever going to get is proof that his IP address is the source of his many different personas (leaving Gary with his "It was my visiting uncle and nephew posting from my computer!" defense). Again, Scipio will continue to introduce as much blather ("Pat is just blaming everything on shorting") without ever introducing any quotes to support their claim, because that is the script they are all on. Gary thinks that by repeating a lie loudly and often he can get people to accept it. It has been amusing to watch from the sidelines, and see how long it takes people to wake up to this. It has taken a little longer than I thought, but I am glad to see these guys starting to fall apart. Patrick
Patrick
But the average reader may still ask, Why are they so nervous, and why now? The answer is, it is because the bullies know what is coming, they know where this antisocialmedia stuff is heading, in a way that the average reader does not. They are flailing in an attempt to derail it. By the way, since they seem so concerned about these issues, and conflate all their unknowns and half-truths into one steady stream of invective, let me help them out: 1) I know Judd. He has become a friend in recent months, but that is not why we hired him. We hired him to work on a project that should reach fruition pretty soon. That project is completely unrelated to any of this controversy. When you see it, you'll think it is pretty cool. 2) I am not behind antisocialmedia.com, offer it no support, it has nothing to do with overstock. Technically, I do not "know" who out there is behind it (the person who is behind it has made an effort to shield me from that knowledge), though admittedly, I have a very good idea. 3) I would imagine that it is barely necessary to remind anyone of this, but just in case: I believe that this country is beginning to see exposed a financial crime of monstrous proportions. As a footnote, we will see exposed a set of unhealthy relationships among the community of financial journalists and the financial agents they cover. Those facing exposure are doing everything they can stop it. Part of their method is to portray me as just some CEO who is mad about his own stock, if only he would pay mor attention to his business, etc. etc., simply so they can divert the conversation away from the data that has become publicly available, data that confirms something has gone deeply wrong in the public market. When you read these guys and their "If only Byrne would stop focusing on his stock price" they are lying (note that they never have actual quotes from me regarding our stock price: that is because they fabricate this as a way to distract you). They are facing the granddaddy of all exposures, and this is their smoke. Check out antisocialmedia.com to get a preview, and trust me when I say, what is coming is much better. Patrick
Re: Even Evren has some value Is it my imagination, or are Scipio's posts just turning into clogging? Here we see some incredibly detailed and well-researched pieces by Antisocialmedia, tying Gary's IP's to a handful of other guys' IP's, tying their posts and areas of concern with various books all together, even tying their word choices together. And in the face of all the screen shot evidence, Gary says, "My uncle was staying with me and did some of those posts, and my cousin was staying with me and he did others of them, and that is why they have my IP." And then, as always, interminable clogging in the hope that he can get all mention of the evidence to roll of the screen. Once again, I post this because I know enough folks come and check my posts that they cannot get clogged: check out the site www.antisocialmedia.com . I am not behind or involved in it (though I pretty much suspect who is.) But some incredible exposes there on my Weiss. I hear that there is more to come. Gosh, it sure looks like those lads at Yahoo's boards are ticked off they cannot screw up this board. Patrick
Msg: 2459 of 7655 11/27/2006 11:35:06 PM Recs: 24 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 2458 by ScipioAfricanus Re: Is it bad when a reporter is exposed as a vindictive liar? Not sure about the book pricing. On Amazon's site Gary's book, with what they call "Standard Shipping (3-5 business days)" prices out like this: Order Summary Items: $16.47 Shipping & Handling: $3.99 Order Total: $20.46 On Overstock, our price with normal shipping and handling (also 3-5 business days: we use the same service) runs like this: $15.65 + $1.40 = $17.05 $20.46/$17.05 = 120%. That is, Amazon's price is 20% more than Overstock's. Now admittedly, one could warp this by comparing unlike things. Amazon has a FedEx price, we don't (though that is coming). One could order Gary's book with something else (a roll of toilet paper: just like Gary's book but with better absorbent qualities), get it over $25, and thus get the shipping for free using holiday Super Saver rates, but it would take an extra 3-5 days. And besides, if we gtet to talk about holiday rates, we have been running free shipping for a few days, will continue tomorrow. Thus you can order it now, get it in 3-5 business days less than from Amazon, and still pay $15.65 versus $16.47. In short, one could argue for all kinds of permutations of the order, and find some that would advantage Amazon, and find others that would show our advantage, but I think the best way to take analyze something like this is just to make a simple apples-to-apples comparison: Go to our site and order this book, and go to Amazon and order it. Use the same shipping method in each case: standard. You will find the books arrive at the same time, and Overstock's set you back a few bucks less. Then return them both, or save them until the toilet paper arrives. Now, stay tuned for ScipioAfriGaryWus to come argue about how my spending 3 minutes last night posting a link, or another 10 just now writing this, is some incredible betrayal of my fiduciary duties, obligations, promises, etc.: anything to keep from replying to the antisocialmedia.com link that exposes him as a fraud. I suppose it is good to stay off it: I hear there are so many visitors on that site today from people in Gary's profession, he would not want to slow the site down. Good luck with that. Best all, and Shop Overstock! Patrick
For those who have not seen it, I suggest reading this. http://www.antisocialmedia.net/ (Full disclosure: I am not behind antisocialmedia.com, but I could speculate who is.) Is it bad? When a journalist is exposed as a pumper of his own sorry books, a writer (always under fake names) of hatchet jobs on his colleagues' work, and in general, a flim-flam artist of the worst kind... is that bad? Is it bad when the exposure makes people question why he spends so much of his waking time engaged in fervent sock-puppetry? It hardly seems like a hobby, does it?
So again, please visit www.antisocialmedia.com and read this. I hear that GW is melting down, melting down, melting down.....
Msg: 964 of 7655 8/27/2006 5:20:36 PM Recs: 8 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites
Return of the Hannibal Hi all, Just catching up after a long time away. Three items: 1) Myself, I have no reason not to believe Selene. Nothing in her story sounds implausible. We have thought about creating some kind of 4 hour order-trap between when orders come in and when they get sent to the warehouse, so we could cancel orders if we want. However, that means that we can cancel the 1 in 10,000 orders that folks want to cancel (if that), but cause the other 9,999 to be delayed four working hours (which means about half of those customers will get their item a day later than they otherwise would). Should we put in place a system to accomodate that 1 in 10,000, but that will cause 5,000 people to wait an extra day? Probably not. Maybe we can only have that order-trap run at night and on weekends..... Anyway, if Selene is in fact a basher, but one who is trying a new approach of sounding reasonable, then I say it is a nice change, and we should not bang on her/him. (Until she starts jabbering nonsense, as she has on the Bunny's board.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense 2) Any reaction to the Floyd Norris piece? Many people wrote that they liked it. I did not, because he once again framed everything as being about a battle with short-sellers (not about stock counterfeiting, naked short selling, undelivered trades, etc.). But, I am interested in the opinion of others. 3) Floyd told me that he had received a FOIA response regarding FTD's in Overstock. We had already seen the response that Dave Patch got that showed OSTK FTD's ended q4 2005 at 2 million, and had peaked at 2.3 million last Q4. Floyd told me that his FOIA response went through June of 2006, and showed them peaking at 3.8 million shares (and ending somewhere in the 2.X million, I believe he said). I present this here in the interests of sharing. I figure I am not violating Reg FD's prohibition against selective release of material information, both because I don't know if it's "information" (I did not see the FOIA response and only have Floyd's word on it), and it would be hard for the SEC to argue that it is "material" (after fighting for so long against releasing such information: what, are they refusing to release to the public information that they simultaneously argue is material?) Interested to hear all thoughts. And let us play nice with Selene. If she is well intentioned or not, at least she is civil, and the miscreants can do us no harm as long as they do not reduce this board to a Yahoo! equivalent. Patrick
Re: What I like about the ostk site Thanks. Not sure what you mean by the bar width: that is mostly a function of your screen resolution. We are looking at lots of site design issues. Looking for all input and advice. Good suggetions earn you a Club O account ($29.95 value). Patrick
Re: Black Bart--Selene To All: Peace. Selene seems legit. let us not harangue anyone just for a complaint. Let us follow better rules than Yahoo! does, I respectfully suggest. You know what I love about posting here, even though the miscreants always criticize me for coming to message boards? It is this: I meet with big-shot investors all the time. They often want to know detailed inside data, and it is always a struggle for me to balance wanting to give honest and full answers with my Reg FD obligations. Here, folks who don't run their own hedge funds get a chance to play on he same playing field that those guys do. Fool got corrupted, I am sorry to say. Yahoo! was a Cesspool! from the start. Here it is respectable discourse. And if you had not guessed, yes I am posting here to try to help Investor Village steal share. When the hordes of bashers show up (Guess We'll have to be on the lookout for them) we want to have our powder ready to eject them. Which means not having itchy trigger fingers now deal with folks like Selene, about whom we do not (I feel) have much reason to be suspect. Good trades to all. Patrick
Re: Black Bart--Selene / Overstock reviews Evren, Thanks for the info. Most of those message boards do not seem very accurate to me, both because respondents are self-selected, and they usually do not control for size (when you ship a million packages/month you have more opprotunity to make mistakes than when you ship 1,000). thus we implemented a great deal of customer satisfaction scoring in the last 18 months, and make review of it every day and week our first priority now. We use both Foresee and Benchmark. I do look at Bizrate scores, but mostly to see how we compare with other sites on specific features like site design and such. Patrick
Re: Volume on Yahoo board I had a call with IPfreele today. First time in a long time. He was on the move, as is his style. All is well. Great art takes time. Patrick
Msg: 665 of 7655 8/8/2006 7:56:31 PM Recs: 3 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 640 by ostkprtnr Re: Bad customer experience Yes. RightNow is beautiful. (Since I mentioned on the conference call that this was going live on August 2, I figure this is not a Reg FD issue). I love RightNow, and plan on rolling out more features next week and in the months ahead. Paatrick
Msg: 664 of 7655 8/8/2006 7:54:07 PM Recs: 4 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 632 by selene Re: Bad customer experience "Dr. Byrne There is no need. I will reexamine my position on which I am sure to conclude that I acted in haste. I suspect I will be able to reach an agreeable result with your people. Selene" Dear Selene, I undertand. please feel free to get back to me if you do not get appropriate resolution. For wht it is worth, I take your complaint seriously, and am sorry about any trouble you had. By the way, it's not "Dr." but "Patrick": the "Dr." stuff was made up by the miscreants evidently as a way to tease me. Yes, in the world of academia that is what students call me, but I never use it in business. Yours, Patrick
Re: Volume on Yahoo board "Most" of those bashers on the other board are really just one Guy Who until a few days ago was not even smart enough to anonomyze his IP. Most of the other bashing is done by another guy who seems to be his junior, or takes direction from him anyway. Just a week or so ago they started anonomyzing with some cheap (and not very good) software: they still leave footprints around the Internet, but they are no longer painting signs. If I told you the trick they fell for over and over and over.... Amazingly enough, they are tied into a cabal on a certain public knowledge-sharing site as well. I know a fellow who spent a lot of time briefing an investigative journalist about it all recently. It will make a heck of a sub-plot in the movie someday.
Msg: 582 of 7655 8/6/2006 11:40:13 AM Recs: 21 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 581 by onelife1chance Re: Onelife1chance, "liquidity based on fails is a prescription for systemic failure and unfairness to issuers." I caught that too: it is a particularly concise and elegant statement of the situation. A year ago, one of the lapdogs (Herb or Mathews, I think, or maybe Roddy) said that I had "gone all in." It was a rare moment of clarity for them. Then they upped the stakes beyond what they thought I could handle, and found out that they were wrong: I had not been "all in" before, and I kept raising. Now they are the ones that have found they have gone all in. The entire establishment press came down decisively against my claim that the market for hundreds of small companies was being warped through a combination of naked shorting and coordinated bear raids. The business journalists dined off mocking it for a year, and their editors implicated themselves through their indolence. Now the public has come to see that a fair bit of what I postulated is in fact likely, become and some has become incontrovertible. As things play out in the next several months, my main interest is not in seeing justice served to the hedge fund blackguards (though that is nearly a foregone conclusion at this point), but in exposing the institutions which failed the public so miserably. Those are the SRO's and the regulators, of course, but also, much of the most respected business press. They are going to recognize that they went all in, too, when they cooperated in a cover-up. Anyway, it's nice to see folks getting it right and saying it better than I could. This industry letter is a good example. Patrick
Msg: 487 of 7655 7/31/2006 12:38:34 PM Recs: 28 Sentiment: Not Disclosed By: Hannibal Send PM Profile Ignore Add To Favorites Posted as a reply to msg 470 by elake60 Re: Any chance Patrick will start posting here? eLake, Thanks. One of the most fustrating things about this has been the way that the bad boys' compliant journalists continually try to spin this as something I am doing because of OSTK. In fact, as I have emphasized from the beginning, this is an issue for America. Our economy is riding down the street with the handbrake pulled so long as this goes on. Every entrepreneur in America understands this situation. Dr. Shapiro says that thousands of companies have been destroyed and maybe a trillion dollars stolen out of the system. I have met others from within game who say that these estimates are low. I feel like I am watching old ladies getting mugged while the cops drive by with a chuckle. So I got up in the grill of the bad guys. As a way of covering-up these bigger issues, the stable of compliant journalists have done everything they could to spin this as, "Just another CEO who is mad about his stock price," One of the amazing things that will come out of this, I think, is the participation of these elements of the business press in the cover-up. They have really gone out on a limb and are in danger of destroying their franchises, I feel, when the truth comes out. Anyway, it is nice to hear that shareholders of some other companies know the score and see why I am doing what I am doing. Regards, Patrick
Re: Any chance Patrick will start posting here? Actually, I have always used as my nom de guerre "Hannibal" after Hannibal of Carthage. The Romans were 10 and 0 until they went and screwed with the wrong guy, who through a series of brilliant tactical and strategic moves took them 2 falls for 3. He didn't just think outside the box, he didn't care where the box was (end-running the Romans by crossing the Alps on elephants? I bet that was not one the Romans had anticipated.) Yes, he lost in the end to Scipio Africanus, fled to Syria and when the Romans caught up with him 10 years later, drank poison. But he fought the good fight. I am also aware of the George Peppard and Anthony Hopkins versions. Nothing wrong with those. One has to set one's sights high. Patrick < EOM >
Re: Any chance Patrick will start posting here? Hi. This is Patrick. Probably not a great idea for me to post often. I want to respond substantively to folks' points (both good and bad), but the more substantive it is, the more there is a Reg FD issue. That is a shame, because I sure would like to level the playing field for you guys. I try to keep it as level as possible by being scrupulous about FD. As much as I wish I could answer some of the questions you post here, I am pretty sure that this would not count as fair and public disclosure. Still, I will be watching: folks always email me the best posts, so I'll be reading those. And maybe I will answer the occasional question that presents no Reg FD issue. I may have to do that on my auctions board. Or else, I might occasionally post a link to something public that answers a question someone raises. Good luck. Your humble servant, Patrick PS It is nice to see that a certain Guy With much time on his hands and who could not Get With the program over here at investorvillage has now Gone Wholly mad. Hours go by without anyone posting on Yahoo. He tries a couple of his old tricks, but there is no one to clog, all sane people having fled to investorvillage. After silence, silence, silence, he suddenly goes back and posts half-a-dozen clogs, and then when there is still no response, he writes: Much better since the scam artists left (Not rated) 7 minutes ago Too many people were getting suckered by low life, scum sucking, penny stock pumping grifters and it's good to see that Yahoo has forced them all to leave. They were unable to continue to clog the boards and stifle discussion under the new message board formats and as a result engaged in a hasty retreat to Guyana. Rate it: 1 star + unrated 5 stars &&&
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Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 3:12 pm Post subject: Open Letter to the Abusive Posters Here To the Vituperative Posters Among Our Auction Sellers, I’ve spent the day catching up on your outrage. I understand the issues and will address them, but at this point, to all of those who have been insulting to my auction colleagues, I say: You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. How did you come to think that it would be acceptable to be abusive and personally disrespectful to my colleagues? It does not fly with me, and you are welcome to take your business elsewhere. I am going to tell you two stories (though I know there are bad people out there who will lie about and twist them).
Story #1: Ten years ago I was working in the shmata trade. The two brothers with whom I ran the firm were Jewish. One day one of them, Roger, who handled large accounts, was visibly upset about a customer. I asked him what was up, but he downplayed his pique. Finally I pried out of him the fact that one of our larger customers, the manager of a store in the Midwest, had made an anti-Semitic remark (something on the order of, “Yeah, when it comes to money you people…” blah blah blah). I was so furious I called the customer, confirmed the remark, and fired him. He told me, “You cannot fire your own customer!” I did anyway, telling him that we would no longer accept orders from him. (Showing immense class, Roger took his call a few days later, forgave him, patched things up, and even refused to comply with my request that he jack the guy’s pricing 20%.)
Story #2: In the early days of Overstock, we were so small that we fit into one room, and when we sold something an email went around the company (“Someone just bought a $29 watch!”) In that environment one afternoon I walked past a customer service rep who was upset, so I stopped. She covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “Irate customer.” I took the phone and listened as some guy screamed at her, using words one does not normally use with a woman. I interrupted the fellow to tell him we’d return his money but were closing his account and not to order from us again. From that point forward that has been our policy: people we do business with can be nasty to me, they can even be nasty to my partner Jason, but no one else who works here has to take anyone being abusive to them.
I have read the postings of moondance4me, jwautographs, and dreamdeals, to name a few, and have seen the insults directed to my colleagues. I have no idea why you think that you can talk about my colleagues that way and continue as our business partners. Forget the two years and $6 million it has cost thus to develop this auction tab for you (and the amount of heat I have had to take from Wall Street, shareholders, and others in the company, all wanting me to close this on the grounds that it is a money-losing distraction). The people you are insulting, my colleagues, have coughed up lungs to try to make this work for you. Even Byron, who has hovered over this board for two years, wants me to tell you that he is disappointed in your behavior. Here are a few simple truths for you to consider: • eBay is already in the textbooks as the most perfect increasing-return-to-scale idea to come along since language. For years it has been an accepted article of faith in business circles that no one could ever compete with eBay, so wonderful was its business position. We watched as the eBay seller community came to feel that eBay was using this wonderful position to hike its fees excessively, “extracting a monpolist’s rent” as economists would say (though in fairness to them, eBay makes the point that they need to do it to cull extra auctions from their site). So we did the unthinkable: we decided to offer an alternative to eBay that gave sellers what they were demanding from eBay, but not receiving. Our skeleton crew developed seller-centric features (such as subscriptions) that eBay has made no appearance of considering. People in our auctions program have turned down lateral moves within the company, so determined are they to make this work. There is not an evening or weekend I come in here that I do not find customer care agents, developers, or seller managers here, mostly working on their own time, trying to make our auction tab work for you. • It has not worked as we had hoped. Yes, we will reach about $40 million in GMV this year and, since Stormy and Meghan took it over two months ago, for the first time it is breaking even (last week it even showed a small profit). But in the two year since it opened, it has not met our expectations, as must be clear to us all. • Our auction tab needs two changes. o Change #1: people are posting vast numbers of “auctions” of the form, “Starting price $29.95, Make it Mine @ $30.00.” Folks, that is not an auction, that is a classified ad. Our real auctions have disappeared under an ocean of such classified ads, which destroys closing rates for everyone. oChange #2: we know that the ethic of some auction sites is, “Since we don’t know if it is fake or not, we let it go up.” From the start we wanted to be more conservative (“If we do not know if it is real, then it should not go up”). In the end, however, we trusted the community not to sell fugazi handbags and accessories. Last week Stormy, Meghan and I reviewed these auctions with the help of someone in our company who for three years made her living buying in thrift shops and selling on eBay. We decided that our auctions of designer items were little better than the competition’s. I know that the ethic of auction sites is to hide behind the claim that they are a neutral venue, and in a legal sense that is what we are as well, but from an ethical perspective, I am simply unwilling to allow Overstock customers, even those visiting our auctions board, to be sold anything fake. If this means that all the auctions business dries up, then that is what it is going to mean. No one gets to sell fake merchandise on Overstock. It’s that simple.
More generally, I think what I am witnessing is a microcosm of what we as a nation are experiencing. Our auction site should first consider the interests of consumers, then small sellers, then big sellers, just as our federal government should first consider the interests of all citizens then, once those needs are met, try to meet the needs of special interests. Nationally, our special interests have gotten so large and well-organized that they have warped the political process to their own ends and to the detriment of the citizenry. In a similar fashion, the largest sellers here have demanded, and received, such special benefits (such as “Trusted Merchant” status, which really conveys no new information beyond “buySAFE” certification) that the principles of our auction tab have been warped as deeply as our nation’s political processes.
We must return to our vision of a tab for people who want to create real, old-fashioned auctions, and consumers who want to participate in them in a search for good, legitimate products. This vision benefits the consumer, the small seller, and the sellers of legitimate designer products, in that order. Some large sellers may perceive this as a sleight on their interests, but upon reflection, they should see that these changes are intended to get our auction tab to catch fire, which in the long run is in everyone’s interests.
There are some other issues needing to be addressed, though I am hesitant to do so in this environment of distortion and vilification. But because there are legitimate questions being raised, I will address them briefly. Do people have to change the MIM’s of auctions that are already running? No, of course not. Must the MIM price really be 2X the starting price? One polite and reasonable woman, an antiques dealer, wrote a lovely post that showed why this does not work for her products: her logic is compelling, and we will heed her advice and revisit the details of this (being worked on now). Are there going to be exemptions (other than Enterprise Merchants) from the MIM@2X rule? Yes: we will offer exemptions on a case-by-case basis to anyone else: simply call. But the decision of Stormy and Meghan to disallow what are in effect innumerable classified ads suffocating our auctions, and their decision to have a zero-tolerance policy for fake merchandise, are decisions by which I stand 100%. To all those who thought it was OK to be abusive to my colleagues, I say: after viewing those postings, my instructions were to eject all the nasty critters from this auction tab. I would shut it down before I would ask any colleague to put up with that treatment. It is still my preference to do so, but Stormy, Meghan, and Byron insist to me that you have come from a competitor’s environment where such behavior is tolerated, and you might not understand that our principles are different. So at their insistence only, and this time only (and with the exception of only the most egregiously impolite people), you get a buy. But let’s not have this conversation again. Most sincerely, Patrick M. Byrne
Ha ha - this is a great one. An all-time classic from Joe Nocera, New York Times. Below you will find an email Joe Nocera sent me asking for my "reaction" to some odd claims he wanted to include in his weekly column. Alas, he sent the email Friday afternoon at 12:11 PM his time (note the "10:11 AM" time stamp of our email system, which is in Salt Lake City, that is to say, Rocky Mountain Time) and, as I was in Texas this afternoon in a meeting, I missed the window of a few hours that I theoretically had been offered to respond before Joe's deadline for his weekly column. Congratulations are due Joe, who has crossed a line never previously crossed (not even by Carol!) by those engaged in their desperate efforts to keep the wig in place. ===========================================Original Message----- From: Joe Nocera [2] Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 10:11 AM To: Patrick Byrne Subject: david rocker patrick-- David Rocker made a speech a couple of weeks ago in which he said, among other things, that your lawsuit was nothing mroe (sic) than an effort to silence critics. He also said that Gradient did its first report about Overstock a year before Rocker Partners even became a client. And he said that Mr. Anafantis (sp?) has been discredited with the SEC's "no action" letter. Your reaction? -- Joe Nocera XXXX YYYY nocera@nytimes.com ======================================Had Joe actually abided by the principles of Ethics in Journalism 101, I would pointed out the numerous flaws in his attempt to whitewash the criminal activity of his friend Rocker with a “Free speech in America is very important” spin. Remember, from the start Rocker’s lawyers have tried to spin his illegal activity as being about free speech, and this is how the argument has been met by the adults who have examined it: 1) On 8 counts versus 0, the trial judge in Marin Country sided with us and against Rocker’s claim that this suit was about free speech. In fact, the judge said in the courtroom that after his initial review of the evidence there was a “high likelihood” that we would win the suit. Rocker appealed. 2) The California Attorney General appeared out of nowhere and filed an amicus with the appellate court supporting our side and against Rocker’s attempt to spin this as about free speech. 3) The appellate court recently heard Rocker’s arguments. This Law.com article gives a good sense of how the appellate court responded to the hysterical attempts by Rocker’s lawyers to spin his illegal conduct as being about free speech. www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1176282246984 The Law.com article captures one judge’s reaction nicely: “Justice Ignazio Ruvolo indicated there was evidence even ‘at this stage of the proceedings’ that could substantiate Overstock.com's claims.” Somehow Joe missed that. I’d also have pointed out that Rocker does not seem to think “Free speech in America is very important” when someone criticizes Rocker: Rocker famously sued some message board posters a few years back for daring to criticize him and his unethical behavior (incidentally, that case got laughed out of town). Free speech doesn’t seem to be that important to Rocker, Joe. In the face of these facts, Joe blithely asserts that “The facts are not on Mr. Byrne’s side” without mentioning that the trial court, the California attorney general, and the appellate judge have indicated exactly the opposite, even at this extremely early stage. Joe notes without question that, “Mr. Rocker wasn’t even a client of Gradient when it began writing its tough-minded reports on Overstock,” neglecting to mention that ex-employees of Gradient assert that the firm had a relationship with Rocker even before he formally became a client. Joe writes about his friend Rocker “But you know how lawsuits are: a year and a half later, the thing has barely gotten started” without mentioning that we have been most eager to move forward, but that his friend Rocker has stalled and delayed at every opportunity, rejecting the appellate court’s offer to rule without delay for a hearing: there was even one article where an attorney for the miscreants promised to appeal the appellate court ruling. That is, Joe bemoans the fact that “the thing has barely gotten started” while conveniently neglecting to mention that it is his friend Rocker who is doing everything he can to keep it from getting started. And so on and so forth. Is anyone else noticing that something seems to be going on this week? First, after a year of criticizing me for my decision to issue a press release celebrating my receipt of a subpoena from the SEC, the shills are now trying to make a case that I should have sent out a second press release when I received another addressed to me as a person, though it was a small fraction as long as the first, covered sub-issues of the first, as well as issues related to a broader investigation that is not about me or Overstock at all. As though there is a world of difference between a subpoena addressed to our corporate lawyer asking for our CEO’s materials, and one addressed to me at our corporate address: I hate to disappoint, but that distinction is such a fine one it did not occur to me it was worthy of a second press release. The funny part is how it still has not dawnede on the miscreants that a fair bit of the material being requested by the SEC concerns them, not me or Overstock. What would have made them so angry this week? Perhaps they are mad that last Sunday, at an event hosted by The Economist (a publication with infinitely more credibility than Joe, Roddy, Herb, Gary etc. could ever aspire to), the bad guys lost control of the narrative? http://www.cultureproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49 http://cultureproject.org/video2/archivepages/hedge2.html
Can anyone doubt at this point that we are witnessing the Gotterdammerung of the American mainstream media? Patrick [/i]
Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 1:14 pm Post subject: That Herd of Independent Minds: Our New York Financial Press Some seem to be noticing that my mitzvah (that is my name for my efforts to expose an enormous financial scandal that is occurring on Wall Street) is gaining traction. Forbes has covered it in several articles in the last few months, Bloomberg Television recently released “Phantom Shares,” an amazing half-hour documentary about it, numerous foreign news sources are starting to cover it, The Economist hosted me earlier this week in a debate before an audience in Manhattan ( http://www.cultureproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=49 ), and there may even be a couple more major pieces in the works. It was entirely predictable then, that today Roddy Boyd of The New York Post (a newspaper for people who move their lips when they read People Magazine), Floyd Norris of The New York Times, and Herb Greenberg have all contacted me today about a trivial non-issue but asking precisely the same question in similar language that makes the same false assumptions, almost as though it were orchestrated. How odd (Sloppy work, guys: write back for new instructions). Their sloppiness presents, however, a wonderful opportunity to display the corruption of our financial press, how it shills for the powerful financial interests which own it and against whose perfidy I have been gaining traction in exposing. I will tell you the facts, and then present their questions, to give you an idea of how this works. I and some colleagues (both within and outside the company) have voluntarily cooperated with the SEC for over two years in a variety of investigations run out of several offices. I started doing this because I became convinced our capital markets are strikingly corrupt and have to be fixed or else our country may endure a 1929 event. All along I informed them that at any time I would be more than happy to provide them, in fact pleaded with them to examine, documentation of my various assertions. In addition, I repeatedly suggested to them that on any issue within the company about which they ahd any doubt or concern, to please permit me to provide them whatever documentation they needed in order to clear their minds and satisfy themselves that my motives were pure. On May 4 of last year they took me up on my offer, sending a subpoena for an enormous volume of documents concerning my allegations regarding corruption on Wall Street, along with questions concerning issues about which I had repeatedly suggested I would love to clear their minds. Upon receiving that subpoena, we visited them to suggest that it was not sufficiently broad enough, that there were additional materials in my personal (not corporate) possession I would like to turn over that were not covered in the first, and to request that they request these of me (which they immediately did in a subsequent short, 150 word coda subpoena on issues that were generally a subset of the first, along with those additional materials we were suggesting we provide but were in my personal, not corporate, possession). This all happened over an 11 day period in the first half of May, 2006. Though not required to do so, in the midst of it I issued a press release not only informing the public of our receipt of subpoena, but celebrating it. I literally put out a press release of which, their subsequent kibbutzing notwithstanding, I was and remain proud: “Overstock.com Celebrates Receipt of SEC Subpoena” (http://investors.overstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=131091&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=858248&highlight= ). And in subsequent interviews and radio appearances I have discussed these events. Now, a year later, how odd that the precise set of journalists and their lampreys (can lampreys have lampreys?) who write stories that support the investment positions of a small stable of hedge funds would concern themselves with precisely the same trivial point on the same non-issue that I have been discussing publicly for over a year. These three journalists have apparently decide that have decided that this was not enough, that I should have put out another press release about the coda-subpoena that followed up on the first that I announced with a press release, which itself made headlines for my decision to publicize my “celebration” of it, as though (after all that). Typical of their ilk is this from Herb: Quote: From: Greenberg, Herbert [3] Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 6:05 AM To: Patrick Byrne Cc: XXX Subject: Patrick's subpoena Patrick, I'm working on a small piece about your subpoena and had one question: Why did you wait nearly a full year to disclose your subpoena? Thanks, Herb Greenberg
Quote: “i had no idea of was that you had received a subpoena. looking at the docs last night, it is disclosed that you did get one. why the 1 year delay in disclosure?”
The beat goes on. I’m just curious that I did not hear from Bethany and Carol as well. Here is the punch-line: as a matter of law I must tread carefully here, but I can say that the heart of the investigation is not, I would suggest, Overstock-centric, but rather, concerns itself with a strange set of relationships among ….. Well, let me just say that the irony here is just delicious. In a strange occurrence that would tend to confirm the existence of a karmic balance in the universe, not long ago I was contacted by a source located at the core of the relationships alluded to above. That source paints a startlingly clear picture of how this “system” really works, backed up by approximately one-thousand emails and other documents provided to confirm every word. Given the apparent locus of the SEC’s interest, you can expect me to deal with this gold mine of evidence as any concerned citizen would. Your humble servant,
Message hannibal Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:43 pm Post subject: Bloomberg Television SCANDAL! Bloomberg Television has produced a shocking 25 minute exposé showing how Wall Street rogues are exploiting a crack in the system to steal tens of billions of dollars from Americans. The Bloomberg piece starts by talking about Overstock (I make a brief appearance, as a guy just trying to be a good citizen), but goes on to describe a wildly illegal scheme that hurts thousands of companies and millions of Americans with stock accounts. This may turn into a financial scandal that makes Enron look like a Sunday picnic. Bloomberg News is arguably the most highly-regarded and trustworthy news service in the US. Please tune in to Bloomberg Television today, Friday April 6, at 11 AM ET or 4 PM ET (or simply watch it online at Bloomberg.com). Respectfully,
P.S. - Please shop Overstock.com and get Free Shipping* on your order when you click here!
Last edited by hannibal on Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:48 pm; edited 3 times in total
Did I handle this appropriately? Yes 91% [ 31 ] No 8% [ 3 ] Total Votes : 34
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 1:13 am Post subject: Answers for a Reporter Dear Reader, You may know of my efforts to expose a crime that I believe is taking place on an enormous scale against millions of American workers, retirees, and savers, a crime from which a tiny segment within the hedge fund community is benefiting, and that is taking place in under the noses of our financial media. At the heart of the scandal is an obscure but in some ways mammoth corporation called, "DTCC." The Party Line response has been to spin my efforts as just those of a CEO mad about his stock (though I started this while the stock was going up). Yet since I began my efforts a tremendous amount of data has come to light, and numerous economists, financial experts, and whistleblowers have come forward, confirming many of my claims. The story is cracking into the mainstream. Last April a Bloomberg expose by Bob Drummond detailed how counterfeit shares flooding our financial system have made a hoax out of corporate elections. In September Drummond/Bloomberg followed up describing the effects of these manipulations on hundreds of companies. Now, the current (February 12) issue of Forbes has two stories (by Liz Moyer and Nathan Vardi) that confirm claims which two years ago sounded absurd: that there is a mechanism in place to destroy companies for profit, that hundreds have been taken down, and that Organized Crime is involved. http://www.rgm.com/articles/FalseProxies.pdf http://www.buyins.net/articles/gamesshortsellersplay.pdf http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2007/0212/068.html http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2007/0212/064.html When this is all over, one of the most interesting aspects of this story will be the battle between the 1.0 world and the 2.0 world. The opening shot may have been “RatherGate,” where Dan Rather’s journalism was successfully challenged by a swarm of bloggers (however you feel about President Bush, there is no doubt that Rather’s documents turned out to be fake). But the fight to expose this financial corruption may surpass that, because it has largely been a fight pitting, on one side, huge financial media corporations, and on the other, a swarm of bloggers, retired stockbrokers, and whistleblowers who figured out how the game was rigged and who had the data to expose it, data which much of the mainstream press did everything it could to bury. Incidentally, I do not mean to suggest that the press is monolithic. Two entities in particular have shown great courage: Forbes and Bloomberg. However, so far their efforts have been outweighed by those of Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, who have done everything they could to downplay the data which has now become incontrovertible. In fact, because I believe that a small number of members of the press are somehow involved in this, I have adopted a policy with journalists: until I trust them, I insist that communication between us be on the record unless otherwise agreed. I have stated this policy publicly. http://www.thesanitycheck.com/DrByrneJournalists/tabid/90/Default.aspx There exists a once-respected business writer named Gary Weiss who has become reviled by many people in his profession. Over the last year or so Gary has devoted countless articles and (by the tally of one of his own colleagues) 93% of his blogs to saying that I am wrong about all this, that I am crazy, that I am a bad guy, etc. Unfortunately for Gary, he appears to have a relationship with the DTCC, that corporation at the heart of the scandal (http://antisocialmedia.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.WeissDTCC ). If true, it means that a reporter, Gary Weiss, is taking part in a cover-up. Today a reporter contacted me about this issue. A quick check confirms that Gary Weiss is no stranger to her: she wrote one of two reviews of his book (the other being by another reporter who is ridiculously biased in favor of hedge funds and against America). She and I exchanged a confusing (to me anyway) series of emails, which I post below: I think if you read them and note their obliqueness you will understand my decision simply to post my responses publicly. At her request I sanitized them of any personal contact information from her, and from other journalists. Within them were an extensive set of questions, which I post and answer below our correspondence. Your humble servant, Patrick ==============================From: xxx Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 7:28 AM To: Patrick Byrne Subject: from susan antilla/bloomberg news columnist Dear Mr. Byrne, I write a column for Bloomberg News and am preparing to write a story about Overstock's public relations/investors relations strategy. Judd Bagley already has answered a number of my questions, but some issues remain that predated his affiliation with the company. I have attached these questions to this email. Would it be possible for you to get back to me before Monday night? Thank you for your help. Sincerely, Susan Antilla ________________________________________ From: Patrick Byrne Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 8:47 AM To: XXXX cc: yyy (also at Bloomberg) Subject: RE: from susan antilla/bloomberg news columnist Bloomberg) Dear Ms. Antilla, It is very kind of you to write. I will work today on providing you answers to your questions, but before I do I have several points I wish to address. Please consider this off the record until we have the ground rules of our relationship worked out. 1. As you may know, I am currently working with another Bloomberg journalist on a story and feel at this point that I must include him, in some sense, in my response. I am a "dance with the one who brought you" kind of guy. I feel a little awkward talking at the same time to two different reporters from the same organization: I would feel intolerably awkward if I were doing it behind the backs of one of them. Is that fair? 2. Judd tells me that in your communication with him you referenced my interactions with Mr. Mullaney of BusinessWeek ( http://www.thesanitycheck.com/DrByrneJournalists/tabid/90/Default.aspx ). So it sounds as though you know my public principle: that if interviews with me are on the record, they must be on the record for the journalist as well as for me. Is that acceptable to you? May I consider your letter on the record? 3. As you know also from those interactions which you referred to with Judd, you know it is my general habit to reply to journalists by posting their questions along with my answers on the Internet. I mean no disrespect by this whatsoever: I have just found that the reporters generally make that extra small effort to represent my responses fairly when I do this. Would you have any objection to my operating this way with your questions? 4. In general, I see the situation as being the confluence of four issues: 1) there is a scandal called "naked short selling"; 2) there is a corporation (the DTCC) at the heart of the scandal; 3) there is a reporter (Gary) using his offices to deny, minimize, and cover-up that scandal; 4) Gary and DTCC appear to have a professional relationship ( http://antisocialmedia.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.WeissDTCC ). 5. Simple research shows me that you have a connection with Gary, at least in that you gave one of the rare reviews of his book, and your review could have been written by Gary himself. Candidly, that is a little problematic for me, as is the fact that there are numerous false assumptions buried throughout your questions to me. I do not fault you for that, Lord knows it is easy to get confused about some of this. That said, would you be willing to agree to a basic rule as far as this interview goes, that rule being, I cannot be quoted except by full sentence? No partial sentence quotes? I hope you find these preliminary questions in the spirit in which they are intended. Also, in any reply, please tell me whether you want your subsequent reply to be on the record or not. I look forward to hearing from you, and until then, I remain, Yours, Patrick ________________________________________ From: xxx Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 2:18 PM To: Patrick Byrne Subject: Re: from susan antilla/bloomberg news columnist Dear Mr. Byrne Thank you for your response. Could you address these issues to me on-the-record? Thank you. Sincerely, Susan Antilla
________________________________________ From: Patrick Byrne Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 4:14 PM To: xxx Subject: RE: from susan antilla/bloomberg news columnist Dear Ms. Antilla, Thanks for writing back. However, I am not sure what you are saying: are you asking, "Was your letter to me, Patrick, on the record?" Yes it was. Or are you just asking me to address your original set of questions on the record? The answer to that is also yes, but I have lots going on and it may take me a day or two (if that is satisfactory). I look forward to getting out of the meta-conversation and into the conversation! Warm regards, Patrick ________________________________________ From: xxx Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 6:32 PM To: Patrick Byrne Subject: Re: from susan antilla/bloomberg news columnist Dear Mr. Byrne, In your email this morning, you said please consider this off the record until ground rules were worked out. Then you made 5 points. I guess I'm a little confused that you are now saying that the email that included those 5 points is now on the record, but thank you for clarifying. Re your response to the questions that I sent to you: yes, I'd appreciate if you responded on the record only. On your questions to me: -- You requested that I only use full-sentence quotations from any answers that you send. I agree to that. I'm assuming that you will understand that I may not be able to use lengthy quotations. -- Re my Bloomberg colleague: it appears you already have made a decision and acted on it, so I don't see that my input is relevant. -- Re your proposal to post my questions publicly: I consider my questions my work product at this point. No story has been written or published. I will leave it up to you to determine the right way to handle that. If you should decide to publish my inquiries, I would appreciate that you remove my private telephone numbers. I look forward to receiving your answers. Although I was hoping to begin writing the story this evening, I will delay that until I receive your answers tomorrow. Thank you. Sincerely, Susan Antilla =====================================The questions Ms. Antilla attached to her first email read as follows: 1.At what point did it become a corporate strategy to attack company attackers aggressively? I am specifically referring to your public stance against naked short sellers, brokerage firms (recent lawsuit) and members of the media including Gary Weiss and Herb Greenberg. 2. Did management consult with outsiders (pr people; lawyers; mgt consultants) before moving in that direction? What outside PR firms do you use today, if any? 3. What portion of your time is spent on public relations/investor relations and what portion is spent on operation of the company? 4. Has Overstock ever conducted any polling (or hired someone to conduct polling) of its shareholders to determine their thoughts about your aggressive PR? -- if so, what did you learn 5. What other feedback have you received, positive and negative from your shareholders about your approach to short sellers, brokerage firms, and the media? 6. Why not utilize a strategy in which you aggressively promote the positive aspects of the company rather than attack? 7. You filed suit against brokerage firms on the Friday before a Monday announcement of disappointing company results. Was the timing of the lawsuit in any way meant to provide a diversion from the bad results? 8. I spoke with a securities lawyer and former SEC regulator about your lawsuit against the brokerage firms. It was his feeling that it would be very difficult for you to get the trade data and connect the dots that would support your legal theory. Do you think you have a winning lawsuit that you will fight to the end? From your point of view, is the suit a valuable PR strategy (sending a message) as much as it is a legal strategy? 9. While there are some very aggressive public relations experts who think that your strategy is both advisable and “cutting edge,” there is also a camp that says that it is not productive to attack reporters and file lawsuits. Do you have any regrets over your public statements about news reporters or your legal techniques? I am now answering Ms. Antilla’s questions in this letter below, and will send her a link to this message board post. I hope you in the Overstock Community do not mind terribly having this played out on your message board. Dear Ms. Antilla, I respectfully inform you that I am posting to this board our communications, your questions, and my answers to them: doing so was not my original intent, but your responses to my questions were so consistently oblique that I think it clear this will facilitate the most straightforward communication between us (I am not sure why some folks have so much trouble simply saying, "This is off-the-record," a request which I always honor). I am unable to form form reply to your questions without first addressing the paradigm and the (in my view) false assumptions which infuse it. In brief, you are speaking from a 1.0 paradigm in which there are two competing sets of agents: “corporations” and “members of the media.” In my worldview there are also two competing sets of agents: “citizen-journalists exposing a financial scandal,” and “corporations and their employees whose involvement in this scandal is being exposed.” That some of those corporations happen to be media corporations, and their employees, reporters, neither alters that basic landscape nor makes it incomprehensible.
1.At what point did it become a corporate strategy to attack company attackers aggressively? What I am doing is not “attacking," it is “exposing," but in any case, what should one do with "company attackers” (your term) and if they are “company attackers” why should they be uniquely permitted to atttack? I am specifically referring to your public stance against naked short sellers, brokerage firms (recent lawsuit)… With regard to “naked short sellers,” I view my actions less as “attacking” anyone and more as exposing criminal activities within our financial system, activities which SEC Chairman Cox said last July were “clearly violative of federal securities laws”: is Chairman Cox “attacking” naked short sellers by saying that? …and members of the media including Gary Weiss and Herb Greenberg. Herb may be a “company attacker” as you say, but I think my response to him has largely been ridicule and disdain, not “attack.” If Gary Weiss is also “company attacker” as you say, then so be it, but there is no “corporate strategy” regarding Gary Weiss and, I’ll note, you have mustered no argument and adduced no evidence that there is. You have simply made a flat claim, which happens to be false. I will answer the question that you seem to be wanting to ask here. Yes, at the start of 2006 Judd Bagley began sleuthing and blogging about Gary’s activities, and yes, later in August (September?) Judd joined us and developed our car tab (by November) and now Omuse, but Judd’s hobby of blogging about Gary is no more a reflection of our “corporate strategy” than Forbes could be said to have a “corporate strategy” of attacking Overstock, simply because they employ Gary, and Gary also has a blog 93% dedicated to attacking Overstock.
Only in the following loose sense. There are millions of powerless people being ripped off by forces outside of their control or understanding, and I was taught that while one doesn’t have to go around looking for bullies to confront, when one comes across bullies picking on weaker people one has to stand up for those who cannot. So if you call my Mom, my grade school teachers, my professors “outsiders” whose consultations have caused me to “mov[e] in that direction,” then I suppose I suppose the answer is, loosely speaking, “Yes.” What outside PR firms do you use today, if any? In general we have engaged in little outside PR, though recently there has been a small, two-woman operation back East that is doing some general PR for us. But no, this is home-grown. Can you really imagine a PR firm coming up with this as a strategy? 3. What portion of your time is spent on public relations/investor relations and what portion is spent on operation of the company? It varies month to month, but over the span of a year I would estimate: Public relations: 15% Investor relations: 2% Company operations: 83% 4. Has Overstock ever conducted any polling (or hired someone to conduct polling) of its shareholders to determine their thoughts about your aggressive PR? -- if so, what did you learn Oddly enough, someone told me a year or so ago that he had thrown my name onto the bottom of a political poll, and (according to him) while a bit less than 10% of Americans recognized my name, those who did gave me an approval rating that would make me blush to reveal. I have my doubts about it, because the number seemed impossibly high to me. Our company does the occasional brand awareness poll, and sometime last year we threw on a question to ask consumers if they knew about this contest and how they felt: a surprisingly small percentage had made the connection, but those who did supported my actions by a substantial (but not impossible high) margin. Shareholders: I have gotten significantly more encouragement than discouragement from shareholders. I have considered polling them but would not know how, or what to think if the number totaled 300%. 5. What other feedback have you received, positive and negative from your shareholders about your approach to short sellers, brokerage firms, and the media? Respectfully, I do not know what else to say beyond what I just wrote. 6. Why not utilize a strategy in which you aggressively promote the positive aspects of the company rather than attack?
7. You filed suit against brokerage firms on the Friday before a Monday announcement of disappointing company results. Was the timing of the lawsuit in any way meant to provide a diversion from the bad results? No, the timing of the lawsuit was driven more by missed phone calls, late flights, FedEx deliveries and so on and so forth: as we have said, we announce news when we have it. In addition, this whole “diversion” theory is a little odd: in your view has this been much of a diversion? 8. I spoke with a securities lawyer and former SEC regulator about your lawsuit against the brokerage firms. It was his feeling that it would be very difficult for you to get the trade data and connect the dots that would support your legal theory. Ha-ha-ha: Please tell him I said, “Dream on.” Do you think you have a winning lawsuit that you will fight to the end? Yes. From your point of view, is the suit a valuable PR strategy (sending a message) as much as it is a legal strategy? It is not a “PR strategy” of any kind (valuable or non-valuable) and I have no idea what "message" it would purport to be sending: it is an attempt to seek rectificatory justice for a company and shareholders harmed by criminal activities. 9. While there are some very aggressive public relations experts who think that your strategy is both advisable and “cutting edge,” there is also a camp that says that it is not productive to attack reporters and file lawsuits. Do you have any regrets over your public statements about news reporters or your legal techniques? I regret none of my “public statements” or “legal techniques,” and once again, this is not a “public relations… strategy.” Most respectfully, what part of “illegal” is so confusing? What part of, "There are millions of people whose savings are being stolen, and I cannot stand by and watch" seems so utterly incomprehensible? Ms. Antilla, there are many, many reporters who explicitly ask me (as you have not) for confidentiality, and I always comply. I hope you understand why, given your oblique responses, I thought this conversation would best be continued in the sunlight of public observation. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me (or simply post them here and let me know). Until then, I wish you all the best, and I remain, Yours, Patrick M. Byrne
Folks, As you know, historically our STR has been abysmally low. We charged so little for the auctions that we did not feel too badly about it. But we set about making some changes, and they seem to be working. A few weeks ago we had our first day with sell-through-rates over 10.0%. Then last week we had our first day with sell-through-rates over 20.0%. Yesterday our sell-through-rate was 31.0%. I believe (but want to be corrected if I am wrong) that this is now slighly above eBay's. That is, a third party reports eBay's closing rate as being about 40%, but their calculation seems to be more generous (in that a Buy-It-Now can get relisted up to three times, and the first two failures do not count against the STR score). Is this true? Does anyone have any knowledge you can share with me on this? Now that we (collectively) have an auction site that is viable, and letting sellers get acceptable closing rates (at last), I hope you are spreading the word in the eBay buying community that there are good deals here, without the overwhelming competition (yet) from other bidders that eBay has. I think that is the right message to send the eBay buying community: when you bid on auctions at Overstock, all the best deals do not get bid away (or sniped) from you. In any case, thank you for sticking with us until the fire began to burn. Patrick
Greetings Sellers, We recently informed you that subscription plans 5-10 will expire on December 31, 2006. However, further analysis has convinced us that the problems arising from O-Subscriptions (specifically, high starting prices, and thus, low sell-through rates) are endemic to all subscription plans, and are therefore detrimental both to your business and ours. As a result, we are ending our O-Subscriptions and have removed the sign-up page. Sellers currently subscribing to a plan will be allowed to utilize it through midnight, January 11. Any unused portions of your plan (including all January subscription fees) will be credited back to you. Though we have eliminated O-Subscriptions, we are excited about other changes we are coding up now. By March, 2007, Overstock.com Auctions hopes to have released a classified ad platform, bid cancellation capability, and the revival of 1-day auctions. We are confident that these site enhancements, along with the O-Subscription changes, will add value to the bidder experience and, ultimately, to your business. Should you have any questions, please direct them to sellershotline@overstock.com. We appreciate your support and wish you the best in 2007. Respectfully, Meghan Tuohig - Director, Auctions Patrick M. Byrne - CEO, Overstock.com Last edited by hannibal on Mon Jan 29, 2007 6:41 pm; edited 1 time in total
Dear Auction Colleagues, We have completed the basic development of our new tab (that one at the far right that has been saying, "Coming Soon!" for six weeks). It is called "Omuse" and it will be going live for the whole world to see in a week or so. O hope that you will give it a try. Even though the tab is not live yet, you can get there directly by typing omuse.overstock.com . A good description of it was sent out today by its designer and creator, Judd Bagley, in a letter to some folks in the blogging community (some of whom are friends of his, some not). I copy and paste his letter below. Judd and I are big fans of 2.0, but we both see that there is a niche that is not currently being filled there. Please remember that it is beta: that means, it is not fully launched, the tab is not live, we undertand there are bugs, and we are asking our friends to come give it a try in order to get your feedback, and so that we may hear about any bugs or ways to improve it. Please come back to this message board and share your feedback with Judd and me. Oh yes: the best part is, we are viewing this as an extension of the Overstock Community, and so your auction sign-on will work on this new tab.
===================================My name is Judd Bagley, Director of Social Media at Overstock.com. I’ve spent the past few months creating something we’re calling Omuse, which is an open environment for people with similar interests to find one another and jointly “write the book” on the activities they most enjoy. You can find omuse at http://omuse.overstock.com We’ve just entered an open beta phase and I want to give you the opportunity to get acquainted with Omuse and, if you wish, be among our earliest contributors by creating a guide to participating in whatever activity you find most interesting.
At this point, the question we most frequently hear is: “what should I write about?”
The answer is simple: Imagine you won the lottery tomorrow and never had to work again. What activity would you immediately set about doing day after day? This is likely the activity that most inspires you, though the one most people around you – spouses included – don’t entirely “get.”
It may be the same thing you blog about, but not likely. It’s almost certainly not the thing you do for a living, but if it is, you’re very lucky.
Whatever that thing is, that’s what we want your guide to be about.
As a guide’s creator, you are in charge of it. You may build it alone or – as we would recommend – with the help of others who share your passion. You get to decide who joins your team and the direction you take together.
Omuse is built on a wiki platform, so we’re frequently asked what makes it different from Wikipedia, for example. I’ve arrived at two answers to that question:
1- Where Wikipedia forbids the inclusion of original research, we like to think of Omuse as being built exclusively on original research, recognizing that everybody is an expert at something, and it’s usually the thing they most enjoy doing.
2- Where Wikipedia endeavors to be like an encyclopedia, where one version of the “truth” must be consistent throughout, we’ve built Omuse to be more like a library, where alternate approaches to the same topic set side-by-side are not only acceptable, but a sign of our success.
We expect Omuse to become the foremost source of practical and applied knowledge online, and hope you’ll help us accomplish that goal by launching a guide and encouraging others to do the same.
jbagley@overstock.com
What would you rather see us offer next? Make It Mine listings with no auction component 51% [ 46 ] One Day Auctions (for sellers who meet certain criteria) 23% [ 21 ] Other (describe in comment below) 25% [ 23 ] Total Votes : 90
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:20 pm Post subject: Decision on Make It Mine, and more advice sought Hi Folks, We've read your responses. If you go through them yourselves, you will see that there is no one answer that meets the needs of everyone (including us). But we do think there is a solution with which most appear to be comfortable. That is, we are going to lower the ratio by which Make It Mine must exceed the starting price from what we proposed (2X) to 1.5X, and not offer exceptions. This code will roll Thursday afternoon, December 7. There are a few folks who have made reasonable arguments that this still may not work for them. To them I have two responses: 1) We will watch and see how this settles out. If it is the case that for higher-priced items this will not work, then we will develop code that lets us adopt a policy of having a lower multiplier for higher-priced goods. 2) For those who say they need to continue the "$9.99 starting price, $10.00 MIM" system, I repeat that this is not an auction, it is a classified ad. It is not that I object to classified ads, I just object to classified ads pretending to be auctions. So what we are now kicking around is the possibility of you being able to list MIM's with no auction component: in short, an explicit classified ad. However, I am not sure I am comfortable with subscription plans for these. Again, we seek your advice. In addition, we know that some were disappointed when we took down our one-day auctions. Our decision to do that was driven by the fact that over time we suspected a higher incidence of fraud was associated with those auctions (generally on weekends). We are considering re-opening the site for one-day auctions, but within some parameters such as weekdays-only, or only for sellers with adequate histories and ratings. Well, we know these decisions affect all of you, and regret that some will be disappointed, but we do hope that by dropping the multiplier from 2 to 1.5 but eliminating exceptions you folks feel that, on balance, we have resolved this fairly, and that you will feel comfortable sharing your comments regarding these other issues (classified listings, and one-day auctions). Best of luck with all your auctions. Your humble servants, Patrick, Stormy, and Meghan Last edited by hannibal on Mon Jan 29, 2007 6:41 pm; edited 1 time in total
Hi folks. I got a bunch of calls in the last couple days about Stormy, why she rolled off auctions, did she leave the company, and who Meghan is. Stormy is a brilliant street-fighter whom I move around the company to dive into our biggest problems and opportunities, usually with a few analysts in tow. When we decided to do mass advertising she wrote our radio and TV ads, produced those commercials with Sabine, and buys our airtime. She also took over customer service and brought it to #4 in the country in about a year. Stormy came into auctions in late September, and within a few weeks had pretty much diagnosed the problems (disparate treatment for small sellers, and the subscription plans that made listings so cheap that we got far too many listings starting at artifically high prices, which smothered everyone's sell-through-rates and destroyed all of our economics). She suggested the plan of going back to a listing fees for everyone, and the other changes we made to level the playing field among sellers. She also realized cut our costs in auctions dramatically, so that the tab became an economically viable proposition for us. As you must have noticed, things have turned around dramatically in the last few weeks. Listings have dropped almost as far as we wanted them to; we see that the sell through rates are many, many times higher than they have ever been on our site; page views/auction have soared, etc. Once it was clear that these changes had pushed things in the right direction, I moved Stormy on to other duties (developing a new source of revenue for us, while maintaining our customer service and branding departments). We handed the reins to Meghan. Meghan is a terrific young woman whom you will be getting to know better (I have asked her to create a forum like mine: you will see her picture up tomorrow, I hope, and will probably never check in mine again). She shares my and Stormy's belief that some basics had been forgotten on this auction tab, and that simplification is good. She has a small, tight team now that has things under control. Our customer service and content review is managed by Jason, a wonderful fellow we hired some time ago with solid experience at eBay, and of course, Joe P handles our relations with the largest sellers. Incidentally, Meghan now reports directly to me, and I am really enjoying watching these changes take hold. i know that I made a few abrupt moves on the controls some weeks ago, because we wanted to start off the new year right. I am sorry about that, but we are very glad we did, because every auctions metric that we care about has turned around sharply. Stormy can be proud of the decisions she made, as Meghan can over the auction tab she now commands. So please, never doubt that you are in good hands with Meghan. We have returned to first principles, adn they seem to be working. Here is a question: it is our hope that by getting conversation rates up as they are now, sellers will gradually realize that they can list more items (I think the average seller now lists more than a dozen at a time). I expect they will experiement, increasing the numbers bit by bit, to see what our traffic supports. I also expect, or at least hope, that as word starts getting out into the eBay community, a few more sellers may come try things. And lastly, I get the impression that some eBay groups are sticky, that is, that some sellers will bring dedicated buyers when they come. How realistic does this sound? Respectfully, Patrick
I write today most respectfully to request your attention to our new "Cars" tab on the our top navigation bar. A car is the second largest purchase people make. Yet the normal car buying experience fills people with dread, fraught as it is with high-pressure tactics. We designed our car tab to reduce that pressure by creating a channel for customers and dealers to find each other and begin discussions on a happy note. Overstock does not own the inventory you see listed: all these cars (new, used, and certified) are being offered by dealers. Simply navigate to a car that interests you and then choose from three options: offer the dealer's lot price, or make a counter-offer, or simply ask for more information. Your entries are automatically and immediately forwarded to the dealer, so the conversation can be started easily, without the commitment or pressure that comes from starting the conversation on their lot. We have long considered extending the Overstock model to the auto industry. In fact, in the last few years folks in the industry approached me several times about doing this, and I, stupidly, delayed it. Now that we have launched it in Beta three weeks ago we see its power already: customers are using it to find good deals on cars. Just as we do with the products we ship you, we intend to uphold our end of our bargain to our customers by searching for the best and most reputable dealers in each state, tracking our customers' satisfaction by dealer, promoting those dealers who really wow our customers (and when necessary, leaning a bit on those that don't). You get to go car shopping with an 800-pound gorilla at your side. We currently have 4,000 vehicles in seven states. This inventory is growing daily, as our "Ocars" team is working hard to bring more vehicles to the site quickly. In fact, I hope to have 100,000 cars by the end of Q1. We'll see. We plan on keeping the search experience clean, making the product descriptions as informative as possible, and creating a car buying experience devoid of pressure. Welcome to Overstock Cars. Your humble servant, Patrick M. Byrne Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 6:11 am Post subject: We're #4 in the USA Dear Overstock Client, To me the brands of Nordstrom, L. L. Bean, and yes, even our competitor Amazon, stand for great customer service. They execute beautifully, and as a result their brands enjoy great awareness and loyalty from the public. Overstock now joins their ranks in setting the gold standard for customer service. The National Retail Federation and American Express recently conducted a study to determine which retailers in the nation, large or small, internet or brick-and-mortar, give the best customer service. Today they released their results: Overstock came in #4, beating over a hundred other retailers and trailing only Nordstrom, L. L. Bean, and (grimace) Amazon. Overstock strives to create a flawless shopping experience. To us, that means offering low prices on a vast range of high quality products, processing and delivering your orders quickly, and wrapping it all up with fanatic attention to customer service. Your feedback is gold to us, so much so that our Customer Care department is boss to the entire company. Since we adopted this paradigm all of our internal measures show that we have indeed developed great customer satisfaction. But it is nice when the NRF and American Express say it too. A year ago we did not score in the top 55. This year we reached #4. We are, of course, gunning for #1. Your humble servant, Patrick
Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 6:00 pm Post subject: Cars Hi. We just rollled out our new cars tab. It is in Beta, so be prepared for little glitches. Still, tell me what you think, and make any suggestions you can think of. Patrick
Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 8:34 pm Post subject: Interesting article http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/12/20/bollywood-hottest-films-biz-cx_lm_1219bollywood.html
I am a fan myself.
Hi all. Thanks to all (even the people with whom I was squabbling) for responding so thoughtfully. I am listening and learning. I will hit the major points raised, then seek advice.
"I would respectfully suggest that had this explanation been given to those of us who have invested so much of ourselves, time & money into Overstock auctions, these 'vituperative postings' and outrage could have been avoided. Aside from being the proper and professional thing to do, I'm surprised that no one foresaw the ramifications of such an enormous and 'immediate' policy change...." You are right. Stormy and Meghan did the analysis that supported this decision, and when I saw it the right course of action was so obvious I was impatient with them about getting it live. But I really do recognize that many of you have also devoted time and capital to make this work, and in the future we can certainly give more warning. And no changes will be again announced in an imperious "effective immediately" way. We are partners, not bosses, and while final authority over such decisions must rest with us, we can involve, inform, and warn you better. "So many of us who have been with Overstock from it's beginning, have stayed with this site, even with it's many changes, lack of certain necessary functions, traffic & business for a variety of reasons... however, I'm sure others can testify that one of the main reasons we smaller sellers have "stuck" is because of the familial atmosphere. That attitude, generated from yourself and your staff made us feel that we were working together to build a better auction site... perhaps a 'more human' auction venue ~ one that allowed, even welcomed our input in our business partnership here, and that while we may not always get what we ask for, we would at least be heard." It is nice to hear, because we have hoped against hope that this is how you would understand this place. It is how we understand it as well. We may not always act perfectly in a way that reflects this understanding, but we do want the family atmosphere where we work through issues together. As you will see below, I am going to ask you for just such advice on some upcoming issues. "That attitude may also be the reason that some felt comfortable enough to post their feelings exactly and as immediately as they were felt, unfortunately." I understand. I just don't want to have a family where some refer to others as coming out of sewers. For your information: Stormy is from Toelle, Utah, left high school to become a single mother, and raised two boys on a shoestring (one is now 20, the other, 17). She joined Overstock as a temp five years ago and hustled from the day she walked in the door, racking up points in every area she has touched (she built B2B, wrote and produced our TV ads, wrote, produced and performed our radio ads, does all our TV and radio ad buying, took over customer service a year ago and built it from not being top 100 to ranking #4 in the nation). Meghan is a brilliant young woman in her mid-twenties who has successful in our market programs, switched to auctions a year ago determined to make it work, and is getting her MBA at night school so she can manage this operation better. She is convinced that this is something that can catch fire, and is, with Stormy, your biggest proponent within the company. Byron is an extraordinarily decent fellow with superb judgement and people skills, though he is no push-over. Jason Smith came to us from eBay, and is another exceptionally able and decent man. These and their colleagues have taken on a Herculean task, and are convinced they can achieve the impossible: creating a succesful competitor to eBay (if only on a small scale). You are part of this family too. So when our family members publicly talk about these family members coming out of sewers, it hurts. In my family, my Pop would have cracked any of us who talked that way about another member of the family. "In return for our continued loyal support and participation, we'd expected the simple courtesy of some notification of major changes or site enhancements, to be given a chance to adjust our mindset and our actions, if necessary. To our dismay & disappointment, however, we often receive no advance notice, and in some cases are only informed of changes when site functionality is affected to the point of inoperability."
"I don't believe that just because we haven't invested $6million should mean that our wishes or our professionalism are unimportant, or that our emotions should be exempt... and if we are not treated professionally & respectfully, how can that be asked in return?" I agree completely. You deserve to be treated professionally in all matters.
That is a major surprise to me. One of the things we are working on is our auction email system. We suspect that the shopping tabs may have scooped some people who really just signed up for auctions emails. We are double-checking our systems to make sure that in the future, everyone who signed up for auctions information gets all such auction announcements.
There are a few ways we can resolve this issue: - Stick with the 2X rule, but exempt some sellers on a case by case basis (we are coding up the functionality to do just that): simply call (or, in the absence of telephone agents, email us). - Reduce the 2X to a rule like 1.5X, or even 1.3X, but have it apply across the board. - Introduce classifieds. That is, instead of starting an auction at $29.95, MIM at $30.00, we would give sellers the ability simply to list the item at the fixed price of $30, with no underlying auction. Thoughts welcome.
- What would happen if we simply eliminated the higher-end subscription plans? Maybe we'd keep it so that people could still have subscription plans up to 100 (or 500? or 1,000?) simultaneous auctions, but just eliminate the crazy, mass uploading of so many auctions that it swamps the site. This would probably be good for consumers and smaller sellers, but not so good for the big sellers (at least in the short run). On the other hand, it would not hurt them much, because most of them do not have good sell-through rates, other than the Enterprise Merchants.
I am really throwing these ideas out for public comment. Please all feel welcome to comment (i fact, don't let the biggest playersdominate the conversation: if they say something with which you disagree, please post a response so I can understand all sides of the debate). And do not get mad if I have said something that offends you. I really am throwing out ideas in the hope that I will learn from your responses. Please just explain the drawbacks, positives, and general trade-offs of these ideas as you see them, and do not get angry at having a dull student like me. Your humble servant, Patrick
Hello. Someone once asked George Schultz, "Who was the most important leader you ever met?" Schultz's answer ran like this: Of all the presidents and prime ministers, kings, princes, and dictators I ever knew, the most important man I ever met was an academic scribbler from Chicago named Milton Friedman. In his first term as president, Richard Nixon famously and erroneously said, "We are all Keynesian now." Friedman shattered that Keynesian consensus to which Nixon referred. Yet though his contributions to economics won him a Nobel Prize, Friedman's legacy extends far beyond economics. A brilliant debater, gracious yet blessed with a rapier wit, Friedman was a man who remained confident in the principles of classical liberalism, and was willing to follow those principles wherever they led (to the occasional consternation of his conservative friends). His argument for the all-volunteer military played a decisive role in that debate, a fact in which he took great pride (once thought daft, the military would never want to return to a draft now), school choice (in my view, the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century), the re-legalization of crimes of self-ownership, floating exchange rates, and a negative income tax to help the less fortunate. In recent years I was fortunate to get to know Dr. Friedman. Some months ago I asked him what it was like to live through decades that saw emerge an intellectual consensus against freedom: did he and Rose ever feel alone and outgunned? Dr. Friedman thought for a moment and said, "We were lucky in that we are optimists. It did not matter how few still understood. The ideas were right." Dr. Friedman recently passed away at age 94. He is survived by his children David and Jan, numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren, and his collaborator and bride of nearly 70 years, Rose Friedman. The enormity of this country's loss in his passing defies description. Your humble servant, Patrick
or visit them at: www.friedmanfoundation.org
Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:18 pm Post subject: Give our giftfinder a try at overstock.com/giftfinder Hi folks. This morning we launched our giftfinder. It is supposed to allow you to make your holiday shopping easy. Just come and answer a few questions about whomever you are shopping for, and it comes back with recommendations. The thing is, it gets smarter as more people use it. So I am hoping that in the next 24 hours as many of you as possible will come use it. Just by clicking around on it you will make it smarter. In a day we will invite a million people to come use it, and next week it will move to our home page. But come give it a try now and let me know what you think. www.overstock.com/giftfinder Regards, Patrick
Hi folks. Sorry for the long absence: I decided to use this board sparingly, and only when I had worthwhile announcements, rather than just writing to fill up a blog (as some do). I do have some announcements coming (as our new site header suggests), but I will leave them for another day. It pleased me to learn recently that some weeks ago a financial blogger of sorts was complaining that I had taken down the posts that preceded “Take 5 With Patrick.” I had no idea he was such an admirer, and regret the discomfort I seem to have caused him. The truth is, as you know, I am under federal investigation, of sorts, anyway: I have accused elements of the SEC of being puppets of Wall Street, they are starting to wake up and snoop around into the issues I am fighting to raise. I cannot quite tell if they are looking into my allegations, or looking into a way to silence me. Maybe a little of both. In any case, one of the things I had to do comply with the SEC’s discovery requests was to round up all my message board posts. I asked a pal to do that and burn them onto a CD, and then I restarted this new board without carrying them all over. I thought it would be cleaner that way. I had no idea of the consternation I was going to cause this blogger: as I said, I wish I had known what a fan I had before I took the old ones down. So I decided to repost them: unfortunately, they had all been turned into Adobe files, and I needed some time to convert them back. I have done so, and will repost them all below, if only for the curious. I am not going to take the time to reformat them to their original look and feel, and certainly suggest that no one (other than those who apparently obsess about me, such as the blogger in question) take the time to wade through them all. Sincere there are 25 pages, I will break them up into numerous posts. And to the blogger who missed these so: thanks so much for bringing to my attention how much you missed these. A researcher at a well-known publication has told me that 93% of this fellow's blogs concern me in some way. Some would find that attention a little creepy, but I, for one, am flattered. Regards all, Patrick Last edited by hannibal on Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:53 pm; edited 1 time in total Back to top hannibal Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:33 pm Post subject: 2004 posts Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 10:11 am Post subject: just some small updates Dear Colleagues, I write to report to you on several developments. 1) As you may remember, we were running at around 22,000 – 25,000 listings until the day we had our free listing day. At that point they jumped to around 150,000. 2) As expected, as they sold through the number of total listings gradually declined towards its earlier level. Still, that spurt did a couple good things for us. a. Sometimes the best way to tune an engine is to gun it and see where it first starts breaking down. By having a 6X increase in our level of listings we were able to uncover and fix some shortcomings. As I have mentioned in an earlier posting, Oracle was terrific in this regard, sending out a killer team to help us do this. We resolved those issues, and the site has been running far more smoothly than ever. b.Once they began declining, our listings declined to around 27,000 listings before stabilizing, so some of that increase stuck to our ribs. 3) We are now ready to do it again. As you have perhaps heard, we are going to have another free listing day Wednesday, December 15. Pile in! We want to see it get back to the earlier high-water mark, and surpass it even. My belief is our systems are going to hold up really well this time. 4) There is a third party listing service who is in the final stages of testing their tool with our API. It will be live soon (but not before Wedensday). I really look forward to our announcement when it comes live. Must run. I hope everyone’s holidays are going well. Humbly submitted, Patrick
Dear Colleagues, I have much for which I owe thanks. You folks, as-yet-unmet denizens of our auction tab, are high on my list. A year ago we decided to do auctions. Though long before that I was anxious to do them, I needed to wait until we had the cycles to develop this, and until I had the general (Brilliant Holly) to lead the charge. For all that time I watched eBay, convinced that the more dominant they became, the greater would be our odds. When we launched auctions the Wall Street boys thought I was nuts. “Compete with eBay?!?! Are you crazy?” was their predictable response. All my life I have seen good new ideas met with derision and rejected as “obviously” dumb. The doubters forget that if the wisdom of a new idea were obvious, others would likely have thought of it first. Your reception has been intriguing. We expected a hard time convincing sellers of the advantage of helping us build a legitimate competitor to eBay. In fact, of course, it took your community about one day to figure that out (far faster than Wall Street!) Since then, the support and tolerance you have shown us has been amazing. I understand from these boards that customer service (which is housed in a facility twenty miles away from our HQ) has not always been satisfying. Two weeks ago we decided to expand our auction customer service, but rather than doing it at that remote facility, we went out and hired a 25 people, and since then have been training them as auction specialists. On Monday they start work at HQ, in an office across the hall from Holly, Sam, and Byron, so the loop between your needs and our auction executives will be much tighter and we will, I hope, better meet your expectations. This autumn, while some on this board were screaming that we were uncommunicative, it was because people were working around the clock (literally, sleeping and showering here) to finish up some piece of code (like O-lister). So it was with our API’s: we needed to get them released to the world so that folks like Infopia and many others could go to work interfacing with our system. Sometimes, when we were non-responsive, we actually just had our heads under the hood. Believe me, we hated it when we saw auctions crashing, the “triangle page” being served, and so on. There simply was no way to debug all the code until we launched and put stress on the system. But the long-timers here will agree, I think, that things have greatly improved over three months: for example, while the first free listing day (late November) caused us to stumble, the ones in December were pulled off with ease (our action CPU’s now clock at 10%: they are just purring along). Less time fighting fires means more time to build the features you want. In closing, I want to thank you again: we, a thousand strangers, have this odd, symbiotic relationship with each other. As always, I am in your debt, and I remain, Your humble servant, Patrick Back to top hannibal Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject: early 2005 Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 6:09 pm Post subject: February 20 -THE MOMENT TO STRIKE. HELP CONTACT EBAY BUYERS Colleagues, My SITuation REPort: 1. Listings: a. Friday, February 18, eBay raised their fees. b. We were already 30%+ off of eBay, but against their new fees we drop to about 40-50% off. As a bonus, we dropped fees another 52% on February 18, for one month, and are giving credits. c. Also on Friday, we went live with ChannelAdvisor.com . For 60 days, anyone listing on our site using ChannelAdvisor’s tool will see free postings (“big thing brewing” I referred to last week.) d. As a result of these dynamics, our listings have soared from 50k to 90k in two days. The quality of listings is excellent. 2. Advertising. a. When we launched we thought it was going to take us awhile to show eBay Powersellers that their interests aligned with ours: “You will not get a fair shake from eBay until a legitimate competitor develops, and we want to be that competitor, so help us.” i. Thus, our TV commercial promoting auctions, and our radio commercial, were designed to convince eBay SELLERS to give us a shot. ii. In fact, of course, it took the community of eBay Powersellers about 48 hours to figure that out. b. Thus, we have been rewriting our radio and TV ads to focus more on drawing eBay BUYERS to our site. I sought and received excellent advice from this message board, advice I incorporated into our new buyer-oriented radio ad, and the new TV ad whose filming we are arranging. c. Starting on Friday, all radio and TV ads switched to focus on auctions. All radio ads are the new, buyer-oriented ad you helped me write. We switched all TV advertising to the auction ad as well (on cable stations: we are still fighting to get the networks to play it). For the next N weeks, all advertising will be focused on auctions, to try to make this catch fire. 3. HOW YOU CAN HELP. We (you and Overstock) have one chance to make this work. You gain, we gain. Given the confluence of eBay’s fee hike, our drop, ChannelAdvisor, and our focusing all advertising on auctions, now is that chance. a. Listen to our new radio ad. I tried to hit all the points you wanted. Let me know if it is too wordy. Post any edits you want to see. b. EACH OF YOU KNOW THOUSANDS (IF NOT MORE) EBAY BUYERS. NOW IS THE TIME TO CONTACT THEM AND TELL THEM TO TRY OVERSTOCK AUCTIONS. i. Our listings are respectable in quantity (» 100,000) and quality. ii. Our technology is working smoothly. iii. Our auctions customer service department is staffed, trained, and broken in. In sum, if there were ever a time to strike, now is it. We are doing our part. We built and tuned the site, staffed customer service, cut fees, did a deal with ChannelAdvisor to get good listings, and redirected $500k/week of advertising to focus on auctions. PLEASE DO "YOUR PART" BY TELLING THOUSANDS OF EBAY BUYERS TO TRY US NOW. You’d be doing us a favor, I know, but you are doing yourselves a favor too. Your humble servant,
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Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:36 pm Post subject: The games begin Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2005 10:31 pm Post subject: February 28 -new interview to keep an eye on Hi all, I spoke today with a journalist from the WSJ. He seems like a decent guy: I think we have spoken before, and I know I have seen his work, and there is nothing overly misguided about it. However, given the stances the WSJ has taken, it caused me some alarm that, after our interview, he wrote me to say that he had lost the tape of the interview, but not to worry, he had good notes. Hmmmm. Call me suspicious, but I thought it best to reply with a careful restatement of what I had said in our phone call, so there was no chance of him getting anything wrong. Just for the record (and to beat them to the punch, in case they try to twist it), I am going to post here that follow-up letter. Dear XXX, I am glad I called back, and sorry I gave your questions insufficient attention before. Glad as well that you took notes: belt and suspenders, as they say. Given that your tape recorder turned off, just so there can be no mistake, I would like to recollect the points I made in our conversation. 1. “Captured regulator” – using the example of the ICC since 1935 to about 1980, I explained what the meaning is of the term, “captured regulator.” I noted that there are three ways they normally get captured: bribery, a promise of a later job, or simply, psychically. I said that the SEC has become a captured regulatory agency to a significant degree. I think I said that in the late 1990’s, three high school kids and a pet gerbil could have regulated better than the SEC did under Leavitt, but that since 2001 they have done a bit better. Still, there are elements or strata of the SEC that appear to me to be captured, not in “bribed” sense, but in the sense of becoming psychically invested with those whom they should be overseeing.2. Shorts versus naked shorts: I emphasized ad nauseam that I have nothing against shorts, and view it is a healthy part of the system. I have shorted stocks myself. I do think shorting lowers a price, but I agree that CEO’s who get upset about shorting usually turn out to be crooked. The professional short community on Wall Street attracts more than its fair share of scum, I have nothing against them (I guess you could just say I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one).
I suggest that everyone here reads my letter to Justin (which started this thread), and then read his article. His article strikes me as one that was edited not by an editor, but by an attorney. That is cool. I like this system of mine: respond to journalists in written emails, then post those emails on message boards for the public to read BEFORE the journalists get a chance to twist everything to their liking. Next time, I will post the journalist's name and email, so readers of these boards can send their own thoughts. Remember: I really do not have it in for journalists. Most are quite decent. The financial community journalists, however, like some folks in the SEC, have gotten too close to those they should be overseeing. So one has to resort to such measures with both. My guess is that this is going to get worse before it gets better. Remember, as the college kids today say, "Speak truth to power." Patrick
Your humble servant, Patrick
Dear Colleagues, The issue of “naked shorting” is becoming a news item, and is even (perhaps) a scandal in the making. I have been called by several publications in the last week to discuss the issue, and there is word of a major exposé on a network news program to run soon. It is especially topical given the issue of Social Security private accounts. As is known by those who have been regular readers of this board, my involvement with the issue is that of a concerned citizen. However, I figured I would write something here so those who are interested can follow along. Some of this draws together points I have tried to make in earlier threads about “Wall Street Criminals,” but most of this is new. I try to explain below the Failure-to-Deliver and Naked Short issue in plain English. You auction sellers in particular will find many parallels between this issue and the issue of auction fraud, albeit on a grander scale. In any case, I hope that those who are interested may find this a concise and useful précis on the issue. 1. Shorting Stock - This is a legal and honorable method of investing. Suppose a share of IBM stock is trading at $90, but I expect IBM to go down. I “short” it. This means that, through my broker, I borrow a share of IBM, sell it in the open market, and collect $90. Assume that IBM then drops from $90 to $50. That is as low as I think it is going to go, so I “cover” my short: I take $50 of the $90 that I collected, I buy a share out in the market, and I return it (through my broker) to the person who loaned me a share in the first place. I am left with $40 profit. 2. Failure-to-Deliver (“FTD”) - The American stock market runs on a “T+3” system. This means that when you sell a share of stock, you have 3 days to deliver that share. If you do not deliver within 3 days, you have, “Failed To Deliver,” or “FTD’ed”. Think of this like someone who posts auctions but does not deliver the goods. 3. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) - This is the back-office of Wall Street. Rather than have investors run around with paper stock certificates, the DTCC keeps electronic records of who owns which stock at which brokerages, and settles the trading of stocks. If you “FTD” (“Fail to Deliver”), the DTCC are the folks whose books don’t match. 4. Strategic Failures to Deliver - Not all FTD’s are illegal. Someone may forget to get shares of stock out of her sock draw and deliver them to her broker within three days of a sale, yet this does not make her a criminal. Also, in the center of Wall Street trading there exists a job known as a “market maker,” someone who is charged with maintaining an orderly market in a stock by continuously buying and selling to create liquidity. Market makers are allowed (on a good faith basis) to buy and sell stock that does not exist, temporarily, just to keep liquidity in a stock. Again, this is expected and allowed. What is not allowed, however, is for investors to sell and fail-to-deliver purposefully: doing so (through a variety of mechanisms that I will explain below), in an attempt to manipulate the price of a stock, is a “strategic failure-to-deliver." Some folks believe that Strategic FTD’s played a role in the 1929 meltdown. In any case, there have been regulations against it since 1933. These regulations provide for civil and criminal penalties (hence I call the miscreants, "criminals"). The slang term for “Strategic Failure to Deliver” is, “naked shorting" (because it is like normal shorting, only one is "going naked" in the sense of not having borrowed shares of stock beforehand). Back to top hannibal Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:37 pm Post subject: Spring 2005 Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 12:53 pm Post subject: New Spin-Job Coming from Carol Remond I JUST HAD ANOTHER INTERESTING CONVERSATION WITH CAROL REMOND, DOW JONES REPORTER EXTRAORDINAIRE. I HAVE BEEN HEARING HER RUSTLING IN THE WEEDS FOR WEEKS, TRYING TO FIND SOME ANGLE UPON WHICH TO DO A HATCHET JOB. HER NEW ANGLE IS THAT I PUT SENATOR BENNETT UP TO HIS CRITICISMS OF THE SEC, APPARENTLY IN RETURN FOR CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS. SINCE I HAVE NOT MADE ANY CONTRIBUTIONS TO SENATOR BENNETT THIS IS A HARD CASE FOR HER TO MAKE, BUT PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE SUGGESTS THAT IS NOT GOING TO STOP HER FROM TRYING. SO I SENT HER THE EMAIL BELOW. FEEL FREE TO WRITE HER AT 'carol.remond@dowjones.com' AND LET HER KNOW HOW YOU FEEL. INCIDENTALLY, NBC DATELINE IS DOING A HUGE EXPOSE ON THIS ON APRIL 10. WORD TODAY IS THAT CBS 60 MINUTES MAY DO ONE THIS SUNDAY APRIL 3. THE MISCREANTS ARE ON THEIR HEELS. Dear Carol, Just so there can be no chance of any misunderstandings, I am going to document our conversation here. 1) I am a bit surprised that Senator Bennett’s office would say I was one of the complaining constituents to which he referred. a) For one thing, though I had substantive conversations with other staff members of that committee. I would not call my conversations with his staff, “substantive.” One reason is that they made it clear at the start that they were up to speed on the naked shorting issue, and that Senator Bennett was already taking a lead role on that issue within the Senate committee. Staffers of other people on the committee all told me the same thing: that Senator Bennett was already the committee’s most aggressive voice on the issue of naked shorting. For example, one of Senator Bunning’s aids said that, “We consider Senator Bennett the leader on these issues.” So while I did have extensive (say, > 30 minutes) conversations with the staffers of other members of the committee, my conversation with his staff was probably no more than 5 minutes. Thus, much though I would like to, I am disinclined to take any credit for his standing tall on this issue. b) The second reason is that I do not consider myself a “complaining” constituent at all. That is, as I repeat ad nauseum, I am not interested in this issue from the point of view of Overstock.com. I am interested in this issue because I think it poses a real threat to the US financial system, the SEC is acting like a completely captured regulator more intent on shooting the messenger than overseeing those they are supposed to be regulating, and the last people who are in a position to do something about this are the senators. c) I do not know where they got the Global Link stuff. I did not send it to them. But I did open lines of communications between the Senator’s offices and folks in the naked shorting movement, so that they could see the material that is starting to percolate up on this issue. d) You should be aware that Delta airlines largest Western hub is in Utah, and Delta is also a victim of the naked shorting trade. Perhaps Senator Bennett has been in communication with them. I have no idea myself. 2) Campaign contributions: a) I have confirmed that I have not given any money to Senator Bennett. Nor have I been asked to contribute to Senator Bennett. Nor has there been even one whiff of a communication on that subject. Believe it or not, sometimes politicians do things just to do the right thing. b) As far as the “Save American Medicine” 527 political organization These were not anti- Kerry ads. They were ads asking John Edwards to support tort reform, and asking viewers to call John Edwards and request that he support tort reform. c) I believe I am one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party in Utah (and am perhaps the largest donor). I have also given large amounts to the Democratic Senatorial Committee in this election and the previous election cycle. I was also the largest donor to Jeanne Shaheen when she was the (Democratic) governor of New Hampshire. 3) I asked you if you are married to someone in a hedge fund. You answered carefully that you are not married to anyone who “owns” a hedge fund. Please let me know if I misunderstood your response. Regards, Patrick
Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 1:12 pm Post subject: My campaign contributions CAROL IS TRYING TO MAKE HAY OUT OF A LARGE DONATION I GAVE TO URGE JOHN EDWARDS TO SUPPORT TORT REFORM. I DO NOT KNOW WHY SHE THINKS I GAVE UP MY 1ST AMENDMENT RIGHTS WHEN I BECAME CEO, BUT BE THAT AS IT MAY, I JUST SENT HER THE FOLLOWING LIST OF ALL OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS. SHE HATES THAT I AM A ZIG-ZAG MODERATE, BUT I HAVE NOT YET FIGURED OUT HOW SHE WANTS TO PAINT ME. SO ONCE AGAIN, FOR THE RECORD: Carol, Because I know you would never want to be accused of incomplete or shoddy journalism, I have dug up as complete a list as I could (on no notice) of the rest of my political constitutions for the last few years. Regards, Patrick ==========================================2002 Mark Pryor (democratic senatorial candidate from Arkansas) $1,000 Jeanne Sheehan (democratic governor from New Hampshire: I was her biggest backer, I think) $2,000 New Hampshire Senate Committee (independent fund for Sheehan) $8,000 NRCC $500 2004 Gephardt $500 Laborer’s International $500 John Kerry $1,000 Pat PAC (a bi-partisan pro-growth PAC) $2,000 Democratic Senatorial Committee $25,000 Castor ( a democratic Senatorial candidate from Florida who lost to Martinez) $1,000 National Republican Congressional Committee $1,525 McCain $500 Swift Boat (when I changed my mind on Kerry) $2,500
Dear Auction Colleagues, My absence has been noticed, it seems, as I am starting to get lots of emails from people on this board asking, “Where have you been? You have not posted since April 1.” Part of the answer is, “In today’s Sarbanes-Oxley era, for a CEO to stay hidden from view from the day a quarter ends until the day earnings are announced ain’t such a bad idea.” But there is more to it than that. Some common questions I am getting are: 1. How committed is Overstock to auctions? 2. Are auctions just the red-haired stepchild of Overstock? 3. How committed is Holly to the auction program? 4. What is happening with marketing for auctions? 5. What steps are we taking to build the auction category? Most every email I have received has peppered me with questions that fall into one of those five buckets. I will take them in turn. 1) How committed is Overstock to auctions? Answer: We do not spend this much time and money developing something just to unplug it at the first patch of difficulty. Read my just-released shareholders’ letter (http://www.shareholder.com/overstock/ ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=160990 ) and notice the part where I said that we lost $1.6 million in Q1. This is serious business to us, and we are investing man-years of time and millions of dollars to make it fly. On the other hand, as I say in that same letter, I want to cut the $1.6 million loss by $1 million in Q2. More on that below. 2) Are auctions just the red-haired stepchild of Overstock? No, but I would understand if the way we have structured things has created that impression. You see, too many times in the past we have tried to develop something within the company, and it got log-jammed behind dozens of other small maintenance projects that were going on. So when I decided to pursue auctions, I decided to do it with a “skunkworks” approach. Holly over in a fenced off area in the warehouse called “Ocean,” auctioning some of our returns off on eBay (she quickly became a Power Seller, incidentally, but I cannot tell you her eBay name). I did that so she would build a team of people who would know and awful lot about on-line auctions, and also, so the word would get out that “Ocean” was our program of auctioning off returns on eBay (thus, if eBay heard any gossip at any point about us being involved with auctions, they would assume that it was this program being referred to, and not think we were developing our own). At some point we were able to get some extra space in the office building we work from (we occupy about 1/3 of it only). The space was tucked-away from our normal office, difficult to access, with 0 foot traffic in it. Holly got Sam out of IT, and together they started building a team there. They slowly got up to half-a-dozen programmers, while at the same time they cut up pieces of the auction project and outsourced them to various programming groups elsewhere in the world (so none would have a complete picture of what we were doing). Anyway, in the month or two before launch they hired customer service people to start banging on the code, but still, the operation was kept quite discrete (few elsewhere in our company even knew what she was working on before we launched, and to the extent they had an idea it involved auctions, they thought Holly was developing some tool for posting more of our products on eBay). Since we launched in September, they have dramatically filled out their team and swelled to occupy most of the cavernous space we had rented for them. There are miniature marketing teams modeled on our much larger teams at Overstock shopping (and Holly had her pick of the most solid players from Shopping to flesh out her teams). She has developed what looks to me like an excellent customer service team, all completely specialized in auctions, sitting no more than 20 feet from her. And on the other side, she has built an extremely robust group of developers (she and Sam no longer outsource any of it overseas). If it seems we seem thin-on-the-ground, it is because we are. Holly and Sam are traveling constantly in support of this auction business. Holly tells me that one of the reasons she is no longer as vocal on these boards is because she feels there are only so many times she can write, “I am working on it, don’t worry, it is coming.” But you have not been forgotten. Far from it: the reality is, she and Sam listen constantly for what it is people are demanding, then put their heads down for several weeks at a time and develop it. When you are not hearing from them it is because they have their heads under the hood together. 3) How committed is Holly to auctions? Answer: 100%. She has no other duties here, and has had no other duties since well over a year ago. Ditto her whole team. There are no split duties. 4) What is happening with marketing for auctions? Most have seen our TV commercial. I loved it (I was there when we filmed it), but dollar-for-dollar it was not getting as many registrants and auction participants as we hoped. Thus we are developing better on-line ways to get auction participants. You will see that commercial for auctions run from time to time, but the bulk of our TV advertising is going to go towards more general Overstock branding (with the exception of a new series we just filmed that should be playing in two weeks, that concerns Worldstock). 5) What steps are we taking to build the auction category? If we are cutting back on TV, what are we replacing it with? Three things: a. Integrated search: We about 100,000 visitors/day to auctions. 50,000 of them search, but they search about 5 times each: 5 X 50,000 = 250,000. So that is how many searches are done every day in our auctions. On our shopping site, however, we have about 1 million people/day, of them 200,000 search, and they search about 5 times each. So we have 1 million Shopping searches/day. We want to get it so that when someone searches in shopping for a product that we have in auctions, then that auction product is returned in the results set. This is not easy, but Sam has solved the technical difficulties and programmers are coding it. We just have to work out the best way to display things. Should be live in weeks, not months. b. Keywords: Our shopping site generates keywords that we buy on Google and Overture. We should do the same with auctions. Our current system ahs to be adapted somewhat: it is working now, but can be juiced up. c. The third I cannot say, as it will give a competitive advantage to eBay to know it is coming. But again, I think this should be done in weeks, not months. Now that earnings have been released, I can be a bit more vocal and present on this board. I will let you know about progress of these items as it occurs. Regards to all and good luck from, Your humble servant, Patrick
Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 2:47 pm Post subject: some thoughts on your responses 1) It is indeed the truth that only one out of three networks will air our "Big Boys" spot ("We're taking on the Big Boys: overstock.com now has auctions, much like eBay, but with lower fees...."). Even that network only agreed to air it after a lot of back-and-forth with us. I cannot say for sure what the objection of the networks was. Maybe it was the confrontational aspect, or maybe it was something else. Your guess is as good as mine. But the fact remains that two networks still refuse to play it. 2) We have gotten a little tired of the "It's all about the gold" spot. So we went and filmed 5 new commercials a few weeks ago, and I just approved their final edits. They should go into rotation in two weeks. At the same time, we are going to cut down on "Gold" to make room for them, we are going to start rotating more auction-Big- Boys onto the air as well (that is, onto our cable spots). 3) Holly refuses to give me deadlines for when certain things will be finished, such as integrated search. She says that if she tells me, and then I post it here, the moment the projcted date arrives she starts getting deluged with "Where is it?!?!?!" emails. So, all I can say is, integrated search is weeks away. And Shopzilla got live since I started this thread. Patrick Back to top hannibal Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:39 pm Post subject: 2006 Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:52 pm Post subject: Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo Dear O-Auctions Community, It has been a year since I wrote here. I apologize. I have been busy, but that was not the real reason I stayed away. I decided to take my act to a more public forum, and also, to distance my crusade from my role as president of Overstock. So I left here and moved over to Fool.com. I have been in and out of Fool.com, sometimes taking a month or two off, but pretty much sticking there. Also, I have been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes writing that you occasionally see pop up in other blogs. That was all a mistake. I wish I had just stayed here, if for no other reason than nobody separates my role as president of Overstock.com from my attempt to reform the market. Also, if I had stayed it might have drawn traffic here for you buyers and sellers. There is another good reason for coming back: you folks know by now how I feel about the financial media. I think it is corrupted and betrays America. There are Tools of Satan who explicitly try to corrupt it, in fact. And when I started appearing on Fool.com, and started gaining traction, the tools showed up and started playing the same games they do elsewhere: lies, "Do you still beat your wife?" questioning, and endless, endless clogging in an effort to wipe out any good material. So it was a mistake to leave. I am back home. I am going to seal my return by going and finding the choicest writings I have posted elsewhere on the Internet in the last year, and bring them back and repost them here. Good to see you all again. Warm regards to all, Patrick
Dear Bill, If it please the Court, I would like to respond to your post on Feb. 9 (“Re: Guest Appearance: A Brief Reply to Bill Mann”). My apologies for not getting back to you sooner; I have been busy selling toasters. I would agree that the SEC's decision to grandfather old fails is curious, and contemptible. It's also extremely predictable. One must ask one's self "qui benes?" As one who has let many an unedited typo slide through, I should avoid saying, “You mean, 'qui bono.'” But I am too much the schoolmarm, I fear. The people who are being screwed the hardest for heavily shorted companies are not the shareholders -- these are largely static short positions. The people who really get screwed are the short sellers who hold legitimate positions. A) Are not shareholders who suffer capital losses also getting screwed? Let me break that down into two questions: B) If a shareholder suffers a large capital loss due to naked shorting, has he been screwed? C) Do you think there are any shareholders anywhere who have suffered such losses? If your answers to B and C are, "yes," then so must be your answer to A. If you would answer "no" to either B or C or both, I would love to know which one(s) and why. Why would the brokers cover, or clear? They've got those shares short in a heavily shorted position for free. Another point of agreement—it's the broker/dealers who are carrying out the naked short selling. I don't recall explicitly alleging that hedge funds were the ones naked shorting, though I believe they play a key role and benefit through collusion. Did you watch my presentations on www. businessjive.com? Let me walk you through an example: 1) The Broker dealer sells Hedge Fund XYZ puts on 1 share for $2. 2) The BD naked shorts 1 share. a) If the stock goes down, the BD's gains on the short are offset by his loss on the puts, but he comes out $2 ahead. b) What if the stock goes up? i) If it goes up $1.50, then the BD loses $1.50 on the short, but makes the $2 on the put, for a net of 50 cents made. ii) If it goes up $2.50, then the BD loses $2.50 on the short, makes $2 on the put, for a ($.50) loss. And of course, anything beyond $2.50 is just additional loss to XYZ. 3) The broker dealer says, what if the stock goes up, XYZ? XYZ says, "I'll sell you a call at today's price for $1." a) Now, if the stock goes up $10, the BD makes $10 on the call and $2 for selling the puts, loses $10 on the short and a cost of $1 for the call. He comes out $1 ahead. b) Now, if the stock goes down $10, the BD makes $10 on the short and $2 for selling the puts, loses $10 on the put and a cost of $1 for the call. He comes out $1 ahead. i) Lemma A: In sum, the BD comes out $1 ahead. c) Note that if the stock goes up $10, XYZ loses $10 on the call and $2 for buying the puts, but makes $1 for selling the call. He loses ($1 plus the gain in the stock). d) Note that if the stock goes down $10, XYZ makes $10 on the put and $1 for selling the call, but the put cost him $2. He makes the amount the stock dropped minus $1. ii) Lemma B: Note that the last two sentences would also precisely describe the economics of this situation, "XYZ pays $1 to short one share." e) Lemma A + Lemma B = The BD rented for $1 his market maker exemption to XYZ so he could naked short 1 share. There are other variations, of course. Imagine that when the BD naked shorts its shares, the buyer is XYZ. Now XYZ has matched puts and shares. (What does he care that they were naked shorted to him? His brokerage statement says he has them). Now he can sell them, loan them to a friend who shorts them, etc. etc. This reminds me philosophically of Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Of course, that book concerns a much graver matter. But among the brilliant ideas developed in that book was her analysis of the moral responsibility for the Holocaust got distributed by a system across a bunch of civil servants: was the guy who created the train schedules culpable? Yes, somewhat. Was the guy who worked in the chemical factory making precursors to the gas culpable? Yes, somewhat. The system spread the culpability around so that a lot of Germans played tiny contributory roles, while relatively few where completely monstrous. It was genocide conducted not by so much by monsters as by civil servants: hence, the "banality" of the evil. Imagine a system such as the matched-put, broker-dealer exemption loopholing system described above. Take it a step further, adn imagine that it is one crooked broker-dealer in BVI doing a piece of it, then a white shoe firm taking the shares thus created and loaning them out again, etc. etc. The system would have no one in it with really unclean hands, but a lot of people in it with an unclean thumb or finger or palm. I'll make a deal with you, Patrick. The next time you are in Washington, I will be more than happy to go with you to the SEC and we can ask them this question together. What question? It sounds to me like the SEC has already taken an interest: subpoenas, investigations, etc. I suggest all read about it at the website run by the dangerous blowhard, www.thesanitycheck.com . His information about the DTCC, the formal investigation, and the subpoenas going out to certian hedge funds, is true. The volatility issue is garbage. I disagree (do you know this via divine revelation, or is there an argument?) In fact, it may be the one honest statement the SEC has made. If just a fraction of the suspected naked short selling does occur, then we are headed for a market-wide game of musical chairs. That is not me saying that, it is the SEC saying it. The SEC may not want to be the one to stop the music. This, by the way, is why I think that the impact of naked shorting is relatively minor, as compared to the vast number of pump and dump scams that take place in the microcap universe of the public markets. Why the SEC allows these capital-destroying cesspools to operate without real oversight is something that is beyond my comprehension. Let's take the 500,000 number presented in the FOIA request. Obviously, now that we know Rocker & Associates are the 9th largest shareholders, at 590,000 shares. I use that particular item because we are reasonably certain that Rocker is short shares as well. So we thus know some details of the short and failed positions as of Aug 1 (which preceded the Rocker disclosure of an increased stake, but the numbers aren't the issue here -- the scale is.) Remember, the 550,000 was the number of failed short sales. It was not the number of failed long sales. Read the SEC FOIA letter closely: they make that distinction. Why might that be important? Because on November 30 I bought 50,000 shares in 150 transactions. None settled for a month. I have the trading data on 144 of those trades. Every single one was marked a long sale. Not a single one was marked as a short sale, though it turned out in retrospect that they were (that is, they were short sales which could not settle, hence no good locate had been made, hence they were naked short sales). Takeaway #1: 97% of the sales that day were naked short. Takeaway #2: None of those unsettled trades would have shown up in that SEC FOIA response. For the record, I believe the unsettled trades in our stock now number in the millions, easily. 1. This short interest number is gross, not net. It doesn't build in the amount of shares that people are long in contra accounts. 2. It also counts all of the clearinghouse shares -- the ones that the big wirehouses will naked short in order to keep an orderly market -- which is both legal and what they are supposed to do. It additionally counts the shares that these clearing houses have in order to clear any options positions of their customers. Bill – Respectfully, this is all words words words. The market maker exemption is a good faith, keep-liquidity-in-the-market exemption, not a sell-and-don't-deliver-for-a-year exemption. Come on. 3. And in Overstock's, and many other companies' cases, the short interest will be pumped up as a result of a hedge against other financial instruments issued by the companies themselves. With an $86 million convertible, Overstock has, if you believe that the amount is fully deltahedged, some 2 million shares shorted that aren't really shorted. But each one of these shorted shares increases the float, regardless of the rationale for their origin. Respectfully, this is just more hand-waving. First, the right number is $77 million and about 400,000 shares delta hedged. Second, that gives a reason why someone would short shares: it does not speak to the issue of unsettled trades. I am sure there are all kinds of reasons people might short our shares, including buying our converts and hedging them, as you suggest: this is unrelated to the question of the existence and magnitude of unsettled trades in our stock. So that's it in a nutshell -- the system is corrupt, but the protected parties are the brokers, who have a license to hold onto securities they have no intention of clearing -- because they're the equivalent of options without expiry. Agree—it's the brokers. You got it. But then there are other elements that simply don't make sense to me about the short conspiracy, beyond the lack of a barking dog for past transactions where there were large short interests. 1. Capital is lazy. Overstock (specifically) to my mind is a hardened target. It's also huge, with a fairly liquid security. (My shares, btw, cleared in 2 days.) Why would a conspiracy target THIS company. It makes no sense. First, “conspiracy” is your word, not mine. For one who has objected to others exaggerating Seth's positions then attacking them as straw men, I would hope you would be more careful. Second, folks tell me that the miscreants came after Overstock.com when we were a smaller company, just before a big push in revenue. Perhaps they thought we would require more secondaries to sustain such growth, guaranteeing an egress. Perhaps the plan was to leverage the dot-com stigma and tank this with an SEC investigation or Class Action suit and barrage of Herb articles, as has been done so many times in the past. I upped the ante so that they can't get out, thus the only option is to throw the kitchen sink at me and this company. But it wasn't a hardened target when Herb first started hitting it and the SI climbed significantly, so there's your first clue. 2. Why, if there are a list of thousands of companies that have been destroyed by naked shorting, is the list confined by name to Sedona, which, once again, took on death spiral financing? That's not exactly the stuff of a large scale conspiracy. Oh, sure, there's JAG Media, Nanopierce, and others that point to naked shorts. The fact that these companies were penniless capital destroyers has to be relevant. Those are the kinds of companies I'd like to short. We just watched DAL get crushed. They had a lousy economic issue, but they also were a huge company on the SHO list until they dropped off and went bankrupt. I imagine that many of the companies that are destroyed by the practice have other issues; the miscreants are clever and there is generally plausible deniability. If your agenda is to maintain it is NEVER naked short selling that contributed to a company's destruction, then you can ALWAYS find other reasons for the destruction. The miscreants would be insane to pick companies that were not already vulnerable--it's one thing to not be a strong swimmer when your boat goes down, quite another to throw the victim an anvil rather than a life vest, quite another to shoot him as he swims for shore and say, “He would not have made it anyway.” Nothing is ever black and white. There are lists of companies that have been badly damaged and have been on the SHO list for months if not a year (recall that there was no way of even proving any naked short selling until the last 12 months or so). A year and a half ago, the mantra was still that it didn't exist. Hard to prove that something for which all evidence is kept secret, caused the destruction of a company, isn't it? Perhaps if all the data were made available then we wouldn't have to engage in these angels on the head of a pin discussion--we could just pull up the total FTDs for a given company and end the discussion. By design we cannot, and that is problem. And we cannot because the SEC says that if they made the information public it would cause too much “volatility.” Hard to square that with your sense that this must be minor. 3. In many countries, naked shorting is quite legal -- most notably Canada. Why is there not a vast swath of destroyed Canadian companies? If the conspiracy works in a market with trillions of invested capital, it would work much better in less liquid markets. Again, capital is lazy, and it is fungible. If naked shorting companies to death in Germany were profitable, there would be tons of pools of money doing this very thing. Again, there you go with your “conspiracy” again. I am not aware of anyone claiming that naked short selling companies in Germany is profitable. Using Germany as an international arbitrage pretence for not delivering your shares in the US is, on the other hand, quite profitable. Did you know that one broker listed all the companies in Berlin, and paid $12K per company for the privilege? And yet most never trade more than a handful of shares every couple of months. What do YOU think the financial incentive was? By the way, the broker that did that used to own 10% of Ladenburg Thalman, who was big in toxic convertibles. Isn't that a coincidence. Ha. Incidentally, there is another big name from teh Den of Thieves days with a significant tie to Ladenburg: any guesses? As to why doesn't it happen more in Canada, I do not know, but I can guess. One explanation is that the grass is much greener here in the US; there are far more companies to savage and, as the case of Elgindy proved, there are highly organized networks that do it here. Why bother with some illiquid Vancouver penny stock when you can take down a $100 million dollar biotech here? There is way more cash to be had doing that than taking down some $3 million mining company. Another, more subtle, explanation made by an economist I know has to do with a form of moral hazard. My friend argues that the pretense of effective institutions is more dangerous than no institutions at all. In the case of naked short selling, the public assumes the SEC/DTCC are doing their job of regulating securities markets and few question participation in those markets, at least not for reasons connected to clearing and settlement. As a result, capital is circulated blindly. Perhaps in Canada, if one knows no cop is on the beat then one avoids dark alleys. Incidentally, Canadian companies are not immune if they trade on US markets. I know Fairfax Financial Holdings' Prem Watsa. FFH has been on the SHO list for over 100 days and attacked by the usual miscreants in the public sphere (including TheStreet.com). Two weeks ago he let me know that a suburban with black windows had pulled up in front of his office, four men came out and harassed people, etc. So sure, I think that the SEC is hiding something. I suspect that they're protecting someone. But I don't think it's what is being contemplated by those who believe that this is a massive, massive scandal that is destroying millions of lives. Operation Bermuda Short gave us a glimpse of how it works, Elgindy gave us more info, RYCO gave us some more. So is your position that this goes on but can't be that big a problem? I'd like for you to be right. But we—myself included-- don't have enough data to know one way or another. I've simply noticed that this giant pink elephant has wandered into the room and certain people are doing everything they can to convince others that it is anything but a pink elephant. It has reached a rather insane degree, in my view. So in sum, my answer is, You might be right, or…. you might NOT be right. Usually the best way to handle such forks in the road is to get data. That is, after all, the whole Western tradition. We ned not take things on faith: we can get facts. So let me ask you two simple questions, sir: 1) What would you consider to be convincing proof of massive unsettled trades in the system? 2) How do you propose we get that proof? If you answer to #1 is a hurdle so high that your answer to #2 is, "We cannot," then you are tacitly admitting that yours is a position not open to evidence or argument: it becomes merely, "To know this we'd have to know X, we cannot get X so no discussion or argument can sway me." The position is not without its merits: like solipsim, it is internally consistent, for example, but you cannot go anywhere with it. Your humble servant, Patrick Byrne Back to top hannibal
A shill appeared many months ago on Fool.com trying to forever quibble about the meaning of obvious words and evidence. He went by "UsuallyReasonable". I was responding to him here. UR, Congrats on getting through another post raising nothing but off-point issues cleverly disguised as unrelated matters. My claim about the Boni paper is that it confronts a strain of the Party Line that runs, "No system is perfect, all systems have error, the FTD's in the system present the kind of random error that one would expect." Against this argument, Boni points out that the errors are not in fact random, but correlate with stocks which are expensive to borrow. If the dogs are eating the stock certificates, they must be very smart dogs who know just to eat the ones that are for hard to borrow stocks. Since that seems unlikely, the other explanation must be that the FTD's are strategic. That, in a hutshell, is the sum of Boni's argument. It is precisely what I presented Boni's argument as saying. To your credit, you get that much right, but then wave your hands around while panting about the deeper implications. Now look at what he does not say. Does he mention Boni's conclusion, which is contained right in the abstract, that the pattern of FTDs is consistent with the hypothesis that they are being done to avoid the cost of borrowing the stock? That THAT is the "deliberate intent"? No he does not. Never does he mention the cost of borrowing, despite the fact that Boni's paper points directly to that cost as the reason for the "strategy" in these strategic fails. What you fail to mention is why any of this complaint is germane. I claimed Boni used statistical methods to confirm that the FTD's were happening deliberately, and you admit that her methods do confirm it: everything else is confused hand-waving. Put differently, there are a lot of things that I do not mention: for example, I do not mention that the stocks which are expensive to borrow are likely to be stocks which have come under the kind of attack which I am discussing, so Boni's evidence supports both the hypothesis that people FTD in order to avoid paying high rebate rates, and that they FTD in stocks which are hard to borrow because they have run out of room to bring shorting pressure on a company illegally. I did not bring tha tup because it was not necessary to: all I needed from Boni's work was her conclusion, that the FTD's were in fact strategic, and not random. Readers, note that not every single line in which I spoke of Boni adheres precisely to this point. Plese review the quote of mine that UR has typed out, in his message, and please witness how it states precisely what I claim it states. UR, all you have done, once gain, is taken some minor point that is not even a point, and then waved your hands a lot and thrown in a lot of rhetoric and, I suppose, hope no one sees through it. Which, as far as I can tell form the letters I get, rarely happens: the public is smarter than you shills presume. It gets kind of funny, because while you guys will quote me at length in some areas, you invariably avoid quoting me in what should be the crux of your argument. You did it again in your message. I'll show you where, amidst the rhetoric: Do you wonder why Byrne doesn't mention this? He doesn't mention it because it does not support his argument -- and he knows it. More slime, no substance. Some people would call that shading the truth; others would call it lying. What would you call it, Grandson? How about, "Using words precisely in reason and debate"? Rather than give Boni's actual conclusion, Byrne leaves open the strong implication that Boni concurs with him that the failures are being done "strategically" to defraud Grandma, because of evil intent, because of the desire to run a company's stock down to zero. Does everyone see the clumsy sleight-of-hand here? "Byrne leaves open the strong implication that the failures are done strategically to defraud Grandma." Now where exactly do I say that? Where exactly do I attribute to Boni anything but a point of view regarding the statistical distribution of FTD's? Surely not in the lengthy quote UR included above. Again, it is funny how these guys will quote me at length where it does not matter, but will always gloss over what should be the crux of their argument. That is because they deal in prevariaction and lies. He implies that Boni concurs with his preceding assertions, which is so far from being true as to be laughable. Again, more assertion by divine revelation. I "imply"? It seems to me that I presented Boni's research concisely and accurately, as UR even admits when he is not whining and waving his arms. (Incidentally, I doubt very much that UR has any idea what Boni does in fact concur with, judging from his post.) Again, ask yourself -- why did he not present her conclusion, if her paper is so fundamental to the case? Boni's conclusion is that the distribution of fails shows that they are not happening randomly, but show design. That and only that is the position which I attirubte to her, and UR admits that this is the only position that I attribute to her (the quote of mine that you included in your post supports my position, UR: if you have some quote that belies this, UR, feel free to post it, but try to avoid the clairvoyant "Byrne leaves open the strong implication" and "Byrne implies" stuff). To the general reader, I hope these examples are starting to add up to something. Why is it we see the same hacks day after day coming back and always missing the same salient points, always misquoting me, or telling us what they think I must be implying? I simply think it is because they are being instructed to do this. It could be that their are as consistently foolish as they pretend, but it is easier to believe that they are just compliant shills. Patrick
UR, I would call this, “pettifogging,” but pettifogs usually have some molehill of which they are trying to make a mountain, whereas you have nothing but a string of words which you seem to hope will bore the reader into submission. This is really quite simple, and I will break it down for you. The chain of reasoning went like this (Syntax: Party Line vs. reality): 1) The Party Line was that stock manipulation through failures-to-deliver could not be going on in our capital markets, but Professor Finnerty has prepared an elegant mathematical proof that it can occur within our current regulatory regime. 2) The Party Line was that, if they do exist, the failures-to-deliver could be explained as the result of random error in an imperfect system, but Dr. Boni's paper showed that the distribution of the FTD's showed they occurred “strategically” in patterns that were not consistent with random error. 3) The Party Line was that, if they exist and were not random, then the failures-to-deliver are rare and appropriately handled by safeguards in the system, but the paper by the four Wharton and UNC economists showed they were “pervasive” and that in 99.8% of the cases the safeguards did not kick in. 4) The Party Line was that, if they exist and are not random and are not handled by the safeguards in the system, they are still not pervasive enough to have a major impact on (or pose a significant risk to) the system. But the letter by Dr. Shapiro discredits this thoroughly, as does the SEC's own website, where they explain their decision to grandfather and refuse to disclose the size of the FTD's out of a fear of the “volatility” that would result. That chain of reasoning is simple and straightforward. You have not pointed out any place I misrepresented any of these sources, but instead, have pointed out that one of the sources (Boni) posits an explanation (avoidance of high cost of borrow) that is not my own (stock manipulation). This point is misguided in two ways. First, nothing in my argument drew upon Boni's explanation for the behavior she observed, but only upon the phenomenon whose existence she proved via statistical analysis. Second, Boni's explanation is not only consistent with my explanation, it goes hand-in-glove with my explanation (miscreants use FTD's to manipulate a stock when the borrow is all used up, and when the borrow is all used up you will find high rebates on the borrow). In the fact of this line of reasoning, which is really quite simple and direct and not beyond that average 16 year old, I think, you are simply throwing around a lot of hoo-hah's and what-for's about what your inferences were, what you think “any rational person” would think, etc. None of it is germane. The chain of reasoning runs as above; you have not said anything to dispute any of the links; you claim that I leave out some of the conclusions and work of Boni's paper whereas the truth is I leave out most of the work of all the papers; you claim that this detail is telling when in fact it is trivial; and you fail to see how even the portion of Boni's paper to which you draw attention not only does not “contradict” me, but rather, it goes hand-in-glove with my own argument. So yes, sadly, this simply looks like more smokescreen to me. The fact that your arguments generally run just like this one, with lots of handwaving and stretching of claims over key points, inferences that you receive in your psychic wisdom which somehow relieve you of making precise, careful arguments and instead, gloss over all the key points some more…. yes, these mark you in my mind as an ideologue. What is your motivation as an ideologue? Could be money, or a dozen other things, or simply laziness, but in my experience ideologues are that way out of habit: they are ideologues because they lack motivations. Along with courage and integrity, for that matter: they shill, toady, and suckup to power because that is their nature. I've seen it since I was a child. It does not take any grand conspiracy, and your futile attempts to pretend that is the claim is just one more example of shilling. Why don't you do something interesting, and try to answer the questions which Seth has been ducking for six months? I bet you'll find some excuse not to. Sincerely, Patrick Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 8:51 pm Post subject: Responding to Euotrash,. another Fool 3/12/06 Trash, Do you and your ilk really not understand yet that your simpering "Oh my god people are laughing at you don't you know what are you going to do they're laughing oh my god people are laughing" could never affect a man like me? Has that really not sunk in on you guys yet? Have you been paying attention at all? Have I shown any evidence of caring what a poodle like you laughs at? As far as the multiple-lending argument: the DTCC swears they do not let it happen. They will not describe the mechanism that they would need in place for it not to happen, and no one believes them when they say it anyway, but just for the record, your whole multiple-lending argument falls flat because it misses that point. In fact, I should point out that it is my argument, not your argument: though it is against the law and their stated rules, the whole NSS movement takes one of its main points to be precisely that such multiplelending does occur, and hence, the number of share entitlements can grow far in excess of actual shares. The actual number, incidentally, is not really, "infinite": according to some, however, it is 15-20. "Bed & breakfasting" shares: are you familiar with that term, ET? Oh, by the way: you keep using the 19 million outstanding shares in your arguments, which is one of the things I consider them so dumb I do not respond normally (someone emailed me this tonight, with a message that "ET sure seems to hate you"). In any case, returning to the real world for the moment, the DTCC only has 8.7 million OSTK shares in its vault. We now have a reported short interest of 8.9 million: short interest is thus 103% of float. As far as the stated rules of the DTCC are concerned, we have accelerated through the speed of light. They have said that this situation is impossible. Now it has happened. Now think up some more simpering statements about my math, Trash. If any observer thinks there is one that is not bonehead enough that it deserves a response from me, just let me know. Patrick PS Incidentally, I don't believe the 8.9 million either: I think that the failed short sales plus the failed long sales + ex-clearing and overseas fails bring our true short interest up to 22 million: some smart observers say I am nuts, and that it really is 60-80 million. We'll see if I can ever get the DTCC to get in the ring with me. PPS Big story breaking next 24 hours. Stay tuned.
Dear Fools, For all who have not gotten the word, please watch 60 Minutes tonight. I believe that it does not even mention "Overstock.com." However, the facts it presents and the story it tells are well known to me, as are the witnesses who will appear on camera. I expect the piece will tell precisely the story of which I became aware in the autumn of 2004. If my behavior has seemed a little strange since then, perhaps it will appear a bit more explicable if you watch this and reflect on the wider market ramifications of the behavior described. Ask yourself as you watch it, "These guys are making money from someone: whose money is being siphoned off? Yours, Patrick PS Remember the story you see tonight is itself just a chunk of the issue of the looting of the savings of Americans. But how do you get someone to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 8:53 pm Post subject: A Poll I put to Fooldom 3/27/06 After 60 Minutes ran it was possible for me to ask Fools, had I been doing the right thing? Here was the response I got in my poll: Nine months ago I went public with a Miscreant's Ball webcast outlining a set of relationships among various hedge funds and reporters. Since then I have been called every name under the sun. In itself that never concerned me, but what did concern me was the complete silence of the non-financial media, and the insistence of the financial media (most notably, CNBC and WSJ) to frame the story as another, "CEO is ticked off his stock went down" event. Nowhere would they print the simple truth: that I was after a gang of thugs who I believe are robbing Americans blind, and I understand how they worked and could not walk on by any more than I could a purse snatcher. But this did not fit the party line and so they could not even hear it. Now that the story is getting unspinnable for them, and now that people are getting a look at the story for themselves (and I promise you, you have seen about 1/5 of what this is really about), I am curious to know your thoughts on a question I have struggled with for nine months now. That question is: Have I done the right thing? 8% (8 Votes) No: Byrne, you should quit Overstock and shut up. 7% (7 Votes) No: Byrne, keep running Overstock but shut up about this now. 36% (36 Votes) Yes: You did the right thing, Byrne, but now leave it to the pros. 49% (49 Votes) Yes: You did your civic duty, now bury these guys.
Back to top Hannibal Report Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 55 Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 8:54 pm Post subject: Poll I took on Fool corruption as I left, Fool 3/31/06 More and more I came to feel that the Fool had been infiltrated by representatives of the bad guys. Too many strangers showed up and either quibbled over unimportant details, denied that even the most patent facts coutned as evidence, or more often than not, simply clogged (posted at high volumes) to wash out any real conversation. So I decided to check out the other day and return here. As I did I figured I would do a last poll to ask, how many others suspected that the Fool had been corrupted as well? There were several shills on the board at that time I posted the poll, adn they all immediately answered that I was a nut (one of the possible poll responses). But as the evening wore on, we got around to the point that well over 50% believed the Fool had been cirrupted and my antagonists there were shills. Sometime the next day, as I knew would happen, the shills were able to organize getting as many of the shills to come vote against the propoisition that the Fool board had been corrupted (the disparate voting by time of day was astonishing and not statistically likely), but even with that, fully 36% of the Fools now believe their environment has been corrupted by shills. Not bad for just a little hobby of mine. Patrick =======================Fools: I have always considered the Fool and especially the Gardners and Bill Mann decent and honorable. However, I believe the deletion of posts has gotten out of hand, and reflects underlying bias at the Fool.com. I will lay out my thinking, then ask your opinion. I am aware that anytime paradigms collide it becomes possible to question the other's motives. So I have not beat this drum as hard as I might have. But from his remarkably programmatic postings here, and his history of bashing stocks that are on the Miscreant Shortlist, I believe Seth Jayson is "bent" and has an agenda (I do not know whether his shilling is from bribery or some other mechanism). I suspect UsuallyReasonable is also co-opted, and has been assigned the task of trying to win non-official Fools to his side as "just another interested poster." I wonder about Eurotrash: occasionally he seems reasonable, but often it feels like his shtick is to play the, "Oh I'm really on your side, but just quibble quibble quibble" game. But I am not sure, I admit. So I wanted to ask carefully for the opinion of the Fools, not to insult anyone, but just to know if I were paranoid. So I posted a poll asking for other folks' read on this issue, starting with Seth. I think this was a legitimate question for me to wonder about, and hence, a legitimate question for me to pose to the Fool community. Early reads of the poll showed that most Fools strongly suspected Seth of being compromised. The poll was taken down. It got deleted, as I am sure any posts asking for others' opinions on the veracity of UR and ET would be deleted as well. I think it was illegitimate of Fool.com to remove my poll on Seth. I really wanted to learn something, and would have learned something were it not for this, as would we all have. I believe it is incredibly inappropriate for the Fool to own the tool of discourse, mold the tool of discourse through Seth, and then prohibit the one tool that would let the rest of us Fools communicate our perceptions without risk of distortion. It takes the marvelous invention that is Fooldom and opens the door to the possibility of it turning into just another closed circle of corruption (like Wall Street and its lapdog media show). This impression has been exacerbated by discovering the TeachMeSomthing is now having even fair and innocuous questions being deleted in favor of Seth Jayson's histrionics. What do observers think? 22% (26 Votes) I agree: Fool.com now corruptly protects shills and suppresses dissent 14% (16 Votes) I agree: Fool now protecting shills and kills dissent, but unwittingly 21% (25 Votes) I disagree: they may be shills, but Fool just wants civilit 43% (51 Votes) I disagree: they are not shills, Fool is right, Byrne is a nut
Since I believe this place has been corrupted and lost its value, I think I will be done with it. In parting, let me fill in a few squares for the honest people here. You will be reading this in the news months or years from now: remember, you read it here first. Herb is denying that he got access to the Gradient reports for two to four weeks after they had published. But on February 14, 2005 he wrote a report on NFI that quoted extensively from a Gradient report released hours earlier. The truth is, at least until recently Herb had a log-on and password at Gradient just like any client. This will come out in discovery. (Want his password?) Gradient's shill Karen Hilton cannot make up her mind whether SAC ordered the report in question or not. This situation is so non-unique, the only question will be which of dozens if not hundreds of examples we or Biovail wish to present to our respective juries. I can line up hedge funds who will say that, Yes, we paid our money and for that we could order two hatchet jobs per year. the notion that Gradient did anything on their own is absurd: many of their "analysts" were hired straight out of Burger King. They were recent college grads who had never held a professional job before, and the content of the reports was largely dictated to them. After hearing stories from the eight witnesses I think Gradient's assertion that these were self-generated will be as laughable to the public as it is now to the witnesses. Gradient had an employee answering one phone on his desk, "Gradient Research," and another on his desk, "Pinnacle Investments." They were trading on Pinnacle's behalf out of Gradient's office (eventually it got moved across the hall). A screenshot of Pinnacle reveals their positions were simply front-running Gradient's research. Cramer is saying that he never heard of Gradient until he got subpoenaed. Becky Quick goes on the set every morning and says nothing. He is lying, as is she (by omission). The truth is, communications exist between Becky Quick and Gradient saying things like, "Jim Cramer loves the Gradient hatchet jobs." "Cramer is having CEO XYZ on and says to get him the latest Gradient stuff on them." Etc. These date from over a year ago. I believe emails still exist on CNBC computers confirming this. If CNBC investigates they will discover that Cramer was lying repeatedly to his audience and that Becky kept her mouth shut: presumably they would have to fire at least Cramer if this happens. If they do not investigate, then when these emails are made public and the world knows that CNBC was informed of this (through this post) and chose not to investigate, it will be the end of CNBC as a news organization. Cramer and TSCM received subpoenas on February 7-9. Cramer told the world about it on February 27th. Between those two dates Cramer and the top three execs at TSCM sold $6 million of stock. Cramer had never sold TSCM stock before. He did these sales pursuant to a 10b5 plan so they show up as, "planned sales." He filed his plan on February 14th. These are just a handful of the nuggets that are going to come out in discovery and trial. These guys can throw all the whitewash they want at this, they can send all the shills on TV that they want to, they can clog message boards and so on, but they cannot change trading records, emails, phone bills, and reports (especially when they already know that the good guys have many of them, and they don't know which they can shred). As I sign off, I see that my last poll shows that 36% of Fools agree that Fool has become corrupted. I sadly agree. Good-bye. Patrick
For those of you who do not know, The Motley Fool was started by two very good guys, the Gardner Brothers, who are both value investors (think "Warren Buffett") and who think investing should be something that should be understood by all. They and the editor they hired, Bill Mann, have done a wonderful job over the years of bringing good investing principles to Main Street. They eschew the fancy lingo and techniques of Wall Street, and they try to teach Main Street Americans how to participate in the stock market intelligently. Tom Gardner had me on his radio show a couple times, and even had me speak at a Fool convention. The Fool (as it is known) has pushed fo regulatory reform that levels the playing field between Wall Street and Main Street. For example, they ahd a lot to do with the passage of Reg FD ("Fair Disclosure"), an excellent SEC rule change that prevents companies from tipping off Wall Street analysts with information without sharing it with the public. because of their ideological bent, I hoped they would join my crusade regarding unsettled trades in our capital markets and collusive activity among hedge funds, analysts, and journalists, but they have not. No hard feelings: I do think they will come to regret their stance someday. Who knows. Nothing I ahve said here should be interpreted as an attempt to disparage the Fool as an institution. I thought and still think it was a great idea. I participated in an attempt to endorse it, and suck more pwoer away from the New York establishment media. It followed me there. I do think that Bill could have been a bit more on the spot to recognize what is going on at the message boards there. But in any case, it is a subscription service: people ahve to pay a fee to access the boards there. Because of Reg FD, I could not post anything material about the business there: if I did, some could claim that I was not sharing information with the genreal public at the same time. So while I tried to recognize that rule at all times, some could argue that even the most general talk of the naked shorting issue facing Ameica was really some backdoor way of talking about Overstock. So I decided to come here, and bring all the more meaningful posts from there and The SanityCheck with me. It is good to be back. Regards, Patrick
Dear Honored Guest, Worldstock is special in a way that can best be explained with a few stories. Worldstock launched in September, 2001. In Peru, we found a small co-op of artisans making leather-and-wood furniture, and asked them to make ten Ottomans for us: we sold out in a day. Then they half-filled a container: again, we quickly sold out. When we wrote about placing larger orders, we received this reply: "The artisans literally wept tears of joy and danced in the streets yesterday when queried about their ability to produce these orders. They promised to do what was necessary -- work night and day -- to make all that was ordered as soon as possible, and more if things continued to sell for you. While many had expressed their sadness at the events of September 11, and to say they were united in solidarity with the USA against terrorism (which many of them have faced years before us), no one had mentioned work. Silently, they had feared that the repercussions of the terrorist attack would harm our economy, and that since they were producing ‘gift’ items, no one would be thinking of buying them. How would they feed their children? they worried. How would they pay tuition for their schools? How would they pay the rent? Could they pay their workers? Or should they fire them now? Should they wait to visit the doctor or buy medicine, not knowing if they'd have any income to pay for it next week? I just wanted you to know that your success with our products means food, schooling, medicine and hope for dozens of families in Peru. On behalf of a lot of happy artisans, thank you." Now we get one container every two months from them, and their small co-op has mushroomed into a federation of hundreds of wood-and leather-workers earning good livings. Similarly, in Nepal Worldstock has been able employ metal working artisans who would otherwise be out of work have lost business due to a Maoist insurgency. In a village near Chiang Mai, Thailand, a small family business employs artisans to make us handmade furniture. In total, thousands of artisans in 35 countries are working to offer you their quality handicrafts in our Worldstock department. We abide by principles of fair trade. A detailed explanation of the history and principles of Worldstock can be found here, but the short version is, we are trying to double or triple the income of less fortunate people around the world, while offering you exotic products at a fraction of the price at which you would find them in expensive boutiques. Respectfully submitted,
Patrick M. Byrne
Overstock.com
Dear Esteemed Guest, You may know of my battle with Wall Street. I decided to write you about it. For five years whispers of an urban myth have held that certain hedge funds use an illegal trading technique to loot the stock market. If true, it means that the savings Americans put in the market are secretly being stolen, while Wall Street hires actors to go on TV to say how safe it is to put more of your money there, and while some American firms are being destroyed. Target companies are thought to be small financial, high-tech, or biotech firms researching cures for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases. It sounds like a Hollywood thriller, but two years ago strangers across the USA who had been wiped out financially began contacting me to ask that I get involved in this issue. I did, and became convinced something hinky was indeed going on. How bad is it? Economist and Former Undersecretary of Commerce Dr. Robert Shapiro calculates that a thousand firms have been destroyed and hundreds of billions of dollars (and perhaps a trillion) looted. If so, this "urban myth" is the financial crime of the century. I tried to expose it quietly, but was eventually left no option but a frontal assault. The hedge funds have tried to deflect this by saying that I am just a malcontent mad about my stock price (even though I began this battle while it was soaring, and have done everything possible to expose this as systemic issue, not just an Overstock issue). Fortunately for them, they have a stable of a half-dozen compliant reporters who obediently stick to any Party Line they are instructed to parrot (they deal mostly in half-truths, but one Wall Street Journal writer, Holman Jenkins, literally created a 100% fabricated quote). Unfortunately for the bad guys, the US Senate Judiciary Committee just held a hearing into this issue, and their Senatorial jaws appeared to drop. SEC Chairman Cox hastily called a hearing wherein he candidly discussed the "long-standing and growing problem" of a "market manipulation that is clearly violative of the federal securities laws," referred to the "serious problem" of Wall Street using a "tool to drive down a company's stock price to the detriment of all of its investors," and acknowledged that the problem may be so advanced the SEC has been afraid to act for fear of "disruption to the markets." The toady journalists have gone unusually silent. If you want to learn more, I invite you to visit a narrated cartoon-lesson I created, The Dark Side of the Looking Glass , which explains this simply and clearly (I wrote it so Grandma could follow). Views are over 200,000 and soaring. http://www.prweb.com/releases/businessjive/podcast/prweb418915.htm
Your humble servant, Patrick
In a remote village in Japan there lived a Zen master named Hakuin. He was known for his devotion to the pure and simple life of a monk. One day, a beautiful, unmarried girl in the village fish market was found to be with child. As it was a conservative village, the family was furious. The girl refused to say who the father was, but after much pressure, she finally admitted that the father was the master Hakuin. In great anger the family confronted the master, criticizing him for taking advantage of the trust he had been shown. They asked him, "How could you have betrayed our trust so badly?" Hakuin's only response was to say calmly, "Is that so?" Hakuin's reputation was destroyed, but he did not appear to mind. When the baby was born it was brought to Hakuin. He took great care of the child, though he now had to beg to survive. The villagers would scorn him, saying, "We will never forget that you betrayed our trust, you miserable monk." Each time, Hakuin would reply calmly, "Is that so?" Several years later, the young mother finally confessed the truth: the baby's father was not Hakuin, but another young man from the village who had not been willing to accept his obligation, so she had accused the monk knowing that he would do the right thing. The villagers went to Hakuin to request the return of the child, saying, "We are so sorry, how could we ever have believed this of you?" Relinquishing back to the family the child who had become his own, Hakuin said gently, "Is that so?"
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick M. Byrne
Overstock.com
Honored Client, Hello. My name is Patrick Byrne and I work at Overstock.com. Overstock is best explained through a story. I went to high school near Washington, DC. There I had a friend named, “Charlie” (a.k.a. “Chalooka”). Whatever I or other friends were considering buying, be it electronics, car parts, a jacket, etc., Charlie would always say, “I have a friend in the business,” or, “I know a guy at the warehouse, I’ll get you a special deal on it.”
We had our suspicions about Charlie, but learned in time that he really did have friends in the business. Whatever business. Looking for a new car stereo? Charlie had a cousin who installed them and had a special deal on a cancelled order of high-end Bose. An affordable trip down to Florida for Spring Break? Charlie had a friend who was a travel agent and knew of a recent cancellation in a good Miami hotel. Needed a last minute gift? Charlie had an uncle with a jewelry shop who’d make a deal on a gold necklace.
In short, Charlie knew people. And he knew people who knew people. He used his connections to look after his friends.
We know that not everyone knows someone like my old friend Charlie. But that is OK, because you need only know Overstock.com. Behind our website and computers and advertising there is a core group of people a lot like Charlie, women and men who “know people,” experts in their fields who scour the world looking for special opportunities to bring to website. Whatever you are looking for, we’re your friend in the business, and we’re looking out for you.
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick M. Byrne
Overstock.com
PS: I hope I am not being intrusive, but from time to time I think I will tack a note like this onto the bottom of an email. These will appear on our message board so you can reply. Maybe it will be possible to start a new kind of conversation: one-to-many-to-many-to-one. In any case, if in the future you find this intrusive please feel free to ignore this, and accept my humble apologies.
Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 10:45 am Post subject: Your input sought I am about to do something that should drive a good bit more traffic to this auction message board. However, I would like to change the name of my forum. I intended, "Deep Thoughts By Patrick Byrne" to be a joke, as in the Saturday Night Live sketches, "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy." But I fear outsiders will not get it and think it pretentious. I have settled on a few choices and would like to leave it up to you original denizens: Take 5 With Patrick Take Five With Patrick Take 2 With Patrick Take Two With Patrick Please vote. Patrick How should I rename my forum? Take 5 With Patrick 58% [ 24 ] Take Five With Patrick 26% [ 11 ] Take 2 With Patrick 7% [ 3 ] Take Two With Patrick 7% [ 3 ] Total Votes : 41 |
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