Bulletin: Overstock Lawsuit Successful!

Break out the bubbly, folks! Forget about the quarterly conference call excuse-a-thon that just concluded. All that stuff about inventory and sales and such is just a lot of bunk -- and not because of the contradictions, dissembling and doubletalk uncharitably enumerated by Long and Short Capital and Herb Greenberg.

Overstock.com must be worth over a hundred bucks a share! That's because -- according to an officer of the the company -- its lawsuit against Wall Street firms is definitely going to succeed, and all that needs to be done now is tote up the damages.

This suit is for $3.5 billion, so that is one heck of an optimistic forward-looking statement, wouldn't you say?

The source of this very valuable market-sensitive insight is none other than Overstock's stalker-in-residence, "director of social media" Judd Bagley, in a post on the Investor Village message board over the weekend.

Some miscreant, you see, had dared to suggest that, well, the lawsuit might not be on the firmest legal ground (as Prof. John Coffee of Columbia University told Bloomberg on Friday) and also might prove to be expensive for Overstock. He/she made an analogy to litigation expenses incurred by the SCO Group.

Bagley, posting as "De Daumier-Smith," the handle he uses on IV, responded as follows:

The SCO and the OSTK litigation have nothing in common: SCO sued based on the expectation that infractions would be found, while OSTK is suing based on the undeniable fact that someone is breaking the law.

At this point, the only thing reasonable people can dispute is how much damage has been done. [emphasis added]

You know, I think it is really terrific that an officer of a public company, unencumbered by legal restraints, comes on a limited circulation message board to predict -- indeed, declare! -- the outcome of a lawsuit just filed by his company.

Of course, if there was some kind of regulation about "fair disclosure" or rules about "materially misleading statements" I guess there might be a problem. A serious one.

Gee, maybe there are. Reg. FD and all that. Oh my.

Is this bad?

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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