It’s Not at All Suspicious That Patrick Byrne Just Unloaded a Bunch of Overstock Shares

 Pic credit: gapingvoid

No serious, see for yourself.

Let’s see what Gary Weiss has to say about his favorite corporate crime Petri dish:

Overstock.com’s wack-a-doo CEO, Patrick Byrne, has apparently found a new kind of crud to foist on the his ever-suffering shareholder base–$3.1 million in Overstock.com shares.

White collar crime fighter Sam Antar has an analysis today of Byrne’s dumping of the shares, which were shed by Byrne’s wholly-owned hedge fund, High Plains Investments LLC.

Barry Ritholtz points out today that he owns shares in the company — an example, I suggest, of the downside of quantitative investment strategies — even though "I personally think it is a steaming pile of shit, that the CEO is an asshole, and that the entire company is probably corrupt."

Did I read that right? Ritholtz is actually long OSTK? Well sh*t, if you look at it as an investment strategy and ignore the blatant fraud, one can assume Overstock has at least two or three more audit firms to turn to just in case KPMG needs to be fired and can keep this up for quite some time as long as the SEC stays toothless. So maybe Barry is onto something.

Uh… Any word on what the SEC is up to when it comes to Overstock?

Gary and Barry floated the theory that Byrne is simply trying to fund the SEC fine his company is about to get handed to their a**es. Hmmm. Maybe he needs to hire some incendiaries to go mess with people who talk poorly of Mr Byrne and his company’s questionable accounting methods? $3.12 million can go quite a ways, you know.

Sam and Caleb also gave Patrick some play for this move.