Taser Shareholders: Blame It on the Boogeyman 34 comments
-
Font Size:
-
Print
- TweetThis
UPDATE: See correction at bottom.
Word
came cascading over the wires Wednesday that shareholders in yet
another company whose stock is in the doldrums, Taser International
(TASR), has filed a junk lawsuit against that all-purpose villain, the phantom menace known as naked short selling. Forty Taser shareholders are suing a bunch of Wall Street firms, which are responsible for the company's shares decreasing. Not Taser!
The suit was filed by the Texas law firm of John O'Quinn, who has filed a bunch of other junk lawsuits on the same subject and has yet to get a nickel from anybody. This is the same O'Quinn who told Dateline NBC that naked shorting has "put as many as a thousand companies into bankruptcy," resulting in "market losses of more than four hundred billion dollars."
O'Quinn said that back in 2005 (when I was writing Wall Street Versus America) and, since NBC didn't bother to do so, I called him to ask if he could name some of those companies. I'm still waiting patiently, hand on the phone, but he hasn't called back. Gee, you'd think that if there was even one such company, maybe he would say what it is. (Another lawyer in the O'Quinn anti-shorting legal consortium, Wes Christian, turned out to be a big seller of his clients' stocks.)
Taser has been a regular on the naked shorting conspiracy circuit for such a long time that I'm surprised we had to wait so long for this junk lawsuit. It is not an Overstock (OSTK)-style train wreck by any means, but its shares are down 50% year to date.
Correction: Taser is not a party to its shareholders' suit, as I erroneously said in an earlier version of this item! My apologies to Taser management for identifying them with the Baloney Brigade, which in my book is one of the worst things one can say about a company.
Related Articles
|
-
The Seeking Alpha 100
See allThe top 100 stock
market authors
selected for publication
Seeking Alpha 100 » -
Fastest Climbers
Authors with the largestSee all
increase in followers
in the last 7 days
Fastest Climbers » -
Top Commenters
Top commenters,See all
as ranked by their peers
Top Commenters » -
Top Instabloggers
The 100 most active
Instabloggers.-
1
TraderMark
-
2
Don Dion
-
3
Cliff Wachtel
-
4
Mike Havrilla
-
5
James Quinn
Top Instabloggers » -
1
-
Top StockTalkers
TopSee all
StockTalkers.
Top StockTalkers »
This article has 34 comments.
Sincerely,
Steve Tuttle
Vice President of Communications
TASER.com
TASER International (NASDAQ: TASR)
17800 N. 85th St., Scottsdale, AZ 85255
Why do stocks that have been off the easy to borrow list for longer than 13 consecutive settlement days still have phantom shares reported as being short? A couple stock examples of listed companies with more shares held than even have been issued (phantom shares) are mbi, ostk, spf (over 50% of float is short with 15.42% held by insiders and 119.5% held by institutions as of apr 25 08).
My guess is that these rules are in place to protect the people, the firms and the hedge funds who are in the position to exploit this.
that i can find to expose you.
1. Sell stocks short.
2. Put too high expectations to guaranty that the company performance will be short of expectations.
3. Take you short profit on stock that fell because it missed the too-high-expectations.
Want more profit? Here is the 1(bis).
1(bis). Sell stocks sooner. You know that the expectations will be set too high. There is nothing to be worried about.
Really, I can understand why the stock was going down from 100E/p to 50E/p, but what about then?
Paranoid fantasy? Look back:
Dot Com - investment banks are found guilty on precooking of future growth of stocks before API;
Enron – investment bunks are involved in many conspiracies in commodity and financial areas; California lost 40 billions dollars; burned retirements and investments);
SUV – pointless, carbohydrates burning monsters; sold on hypertrophied ego and hysteria “I’m going to die”, yes, sure, it’ll turn over and you will die if you are lucky, other way you will be paralyzed for rest of your life, in worst case a person will die in 10 cents collision, where he has 100% chance to walk away by himself, if you drive a normal car; MY APOLOGY – I don’t have data that investment banks are involved in this one so let get to the next one.
Housing - encouraging of unsupported borrowing; manipulations of financial instruments to hide the F-minus rate of the obligations, victorious bravura march “we did it” when lines to file bankruptcy are for month ahead.
Oil – a great idea to recover pension funds; trillions of dollars replaced demand for consumption with demand for speculation; still covered; OPEC is too smart, they do not allow to balloon production of oil, and then to be left with no-body-need infrastructures and devastated ecology.
Encephalitis? Make your opinion... Before it’s too late.
Why TASR? It’s simple. Too many coyotes looking to make their day on the idea”s bones or, may be, to jump into the idea. It’s on the edge. One successful bite and every thing may go down the cliff. No matter of saved lives and medical recovery expenses of both police side and criminals.
I just wonder why there is not any conclusive statistical and medical information in the press. It reminds me the story: Your guys fixed my computer and now the Internet explorer does not work. -When they fixed it ? - One week ago. -When the Internet explorer stopped to work? - Yesterday. –Then what the heck the fix has to the problem. Or another one. New Jersey increased speed limit at some sections of highways. Then they registered increase of accident rate. The idea was practically buried , but a scholar show the deputy that they are idiots. He asked to compare the sections with unchanged speed limit, and sections with increased speed limit during the same years. The sections with unchanged speed limit had higher increase of accident rate.
Taser, show how many people can stay alive if they got shot with Taser instead of fire arm.
Good luck John O'Quinn, and good luck Taser.