Edward E. Faber Chairman"he has been integral in the establishment and growth of several highly successful public companies, including SuperCuts, Inc.,"
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Edward E. Faber
Chairman
Mr. Faber was elected to the board of directors in September 2000 and was named chairman of the board on April 12, 2001. Retired from active management, he has been integral in the establishment and growth of several highly successful public companies, including SuperCuts, Inc., where he was responsible for the Company’s successful organization and initial public stock offering in 1992. Additionally, Mr. Faber has more than 30 years experience building and managing high-technology growth companies. In 1976, he became the founding president of Computerland Corporation, which grew to become the largest computer retailing company in the world. He retired from Computerland in 1983, but returned in 1985 as chairman and chief executive officer until the company was sold to an investment group in 1990. Mr. Faber also served as chairman and chief executive officer of Dataphaz, Computerland’s largest franchise operator. He graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Labor Relations.
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Herb Green on Supercuts
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Look for a revolving door of CFOs. And if the company is losing CFOs or other top execs, with any frequency, you might want to check local courts for any wrongful termination suits. Years ago, I was tipped off that a former CFO of Supercuts, the haircutting chain, had filed a wrongful termination suit against the company. It was full of all kinds of allegations. Turns out his predecessor did the same. That company eventually crashed and burned, and the CEO was kicked out.
Tips for the Timid: How to Detect Financial Fraud and Other Stock Shenanigans
By Herb Greenberg
Senior Columnist
2/11/00 10:40 AM ET
No matter how often I write about financial fraud and other stock-related troubles, readers tell me they want tips on how to find it -- or least how to spot companies that might be having trouble. The requests for tips come from money managers (believe it!) as well as from individual investors looking for an edge. What to look for? This is the first of what I hope will be a regular series of columns that will help give you perspective and avoid getting blindsided. In the future, I'll take you back to how I stumbled on some of my best "hits" and why I stuck with them even when readers were demanding that I be fired.
For a jumping-off point, let's go to the New York Hilton. That's where I was Wednesday, sitting on a panel with accounting sleuth Howard Schilit of the Center for Financial Research and Analysis; attorney Alan Schulman of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, who files class-action lawsuits against companies; and Boris Feldman of the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who defends the companies that Schulman sues. The title of the panel was "Detecting Financial Fraud From Publicly Available Sources."
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Our audience was 500 insurance carriers and brokers at a gathering sponsored by the Professional Liability Underwriting Society. These aren't your usual insurers; these are the folks who insure corporate directors and officers against claims of fraud. As you might guess, their incidence of claims is increasing at a disturbing rate.
So, did I tell them to go before they write a policy?
My top 10 list:
I would look at Baseline, Bloomberg or even the "upgrades and downgrades" section under company profiles on Yahoo! Finance (YHOO:Nasdaq - news). You're looking for analysts who have a sell or hold rating on a stock that most others rate a buy. Analysts don't usually veer from the comfort of the herd if they don't have a good reason. Try to get the reports free from the brokerage firm or, for a fee, from a service like Multex (www.multex.com). Remember when Lucent (LU:NYSE - news) was popular? As reported here a year ago, two analysts had holds on it; today they look like geniuses.
Check short interest, which you can find every month in the Tools section of TheStreet.com and under company profiles on Yahoo! Finance. Short interest, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily mean anything. But it does suggest people are betting against a company. You want to find out why, especially if short interest is expanding. (And don't listen to the sell-side analysts who will pooh-pooh any of the negatives on a company from which they're trying to get investment banking business.)
If the company does have a large short interest and the CEO has waged a public war against the shorts and the company's critics, sharpen your pencil. This is almost always a sign of desperation. It was CHS Electronics (HS:NYSE - news) CEO Claudio Osorio who publicly declared war on short-sellers of his company's stock. That was in June 1998, when CHS stock was around 25; it's now around 1 1/2.
Regardless of what I said above about the sell-side analysts who like the company, do get their reports, and do what I do when I research stocks for the Stock Drill segment on "TheStreet.com" show on the Fox News Channel: I zero in on what they declare to be the risks. It was there that I found some concern for credit-card-related problems at Bank One (ONE:NYSE - news) -- the same credit-card problems that wound up dragging Bank One down.
I would do a scan of any of the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Here I'm talking about 10-Qs, 10-Ks, S-1 filings and amendments. Then I would go to Microsoft Word and use the compare function. (See my column here from a few months ago explaining how that works.) I would compare the actual text in the risk factors and the management discussion and analysis sections. And, just for the fun of it, see how the wording has changed. This led lots of folks to realize that 3Com (COMS:Nasdaq - news) was headed for trouble years ago.
I'd hire a forensic accountant to do the numbers, or I'd subscribe to a service like Howard Schilit's.
Then I would check to see if journalists like me, who specialize in talking to the short-sellers, have written about a company in which you're interested. I talk to some really smart short-sellers, and when they're right, which is often, I always ask myself why it was that the short-sellers knew and nobody else did. The short-sellers, for example, knew that The Learning Company was aggressive with its books for years -- years before it was bought by Mattel (MAT:NYSE - news). I've written it for years. And after Mattel acquired TLC, I suggested in one of my columns that it would only be a matter of time before Mattel learned TLC's dark and dirty secret.
Look for a revolving door of CFOs. And if the company is losing CFOs or other top execs, with any frequency, you might want to check local courts for any wrongful termination suits. Years ago, I was tipped off that a former CFO of Supercuts, the haircutting chain, had filed a wrongful termination suit against the company. It was full of all kinds of allegations. Turns out his predecessor did the same. That company eventually crashed and burned, and the CEO was kicked out.
Check out the message boards on Yahoo! or elsewhere. The more zealot-like they are, the more careful you should be.
Finally, ignore the direction of the stock. Don't let it give you a false sense of security. Back in the mid-1990s, when a company called Media Vision had the hottest stock in Silicon Valley, I had written numerous columns questioning the company. After one especially blistering take, the CEO called said something like, "A-ha, our stock is rising. It shows your short-selling friends are wrong." Media Vision wound up filing for bankruptcy, and the ex-CEO is now awaiting trial on securities fraud charges.
Questions, comments, criticism? Let me know. And if you care to share thoughts on how you spotted trouble, pass it along. I'd especially love to hear from money managers who can give examples of what caused them not to buy a stock that eventually cratered.
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Herb Greenberg writes daily for TheStreet.com. In keeping with TSC's editorial policy, he doesn't own or short individual stocks, though he owns stock in TheStreet.com. He also doesn't invest in hedge funds or other private investment partnerships. He welcomes your feedback at herb@thestreet.com. Greenberg also writes a monthly column for Fortune.
Mark Martinez assisted with the reporting of this column.
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