Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Overstock.com v. Gradient Analytics (Cal. Ct. App. - May 30, 2007)

Yesterday I embarked upon a whirlwind tour through the skies of our fair nation. Spending much of my time, sadly, on the tarmacs of our fair nation. But eventually North Carolina received me with open arms, and I am now warmly in the bosom of that Great State.

When I say "warmly," I kid not. Wow. I had forgotten what summers on the East Coast were like, notwithstanding spending the first twenty-some years of my life there. It's not the heat, it's the humidity. Wait. It's both.

For more uplifting news, here are my thoughts today about the integrity of public financial markets. Think that analyst reports are anywhere near objective assessments of public companies? That they aren't sometimes (often?) basically a fraud?


Think again.


Check out the first six pages, and the rest if you'd like to be depressed even further. No one said that stock ownership was pristine. Still, I thought that it might be a bit more pure than this.


Sure, we all know about boilerroom manipulation and the like. But these are sophisticated -- and increasingly popular -- hedge funds.


Which, perhaps, is precisely why they're able to get away with it.