Until now, you made sense to me. Are you unaware of abusive short tactics and how the shorts operate? It was the subject of a Congressional investigation some years ago. It's not a crime to be short a stock, but it should be a crime when people say and do things that are designed to make a stock go down for their own selfish reasons. I would go to jail, if I did some of the things they do.
Don't you realize that shorts act to destroy shareholders' trust and confidence in a company and it's management. Don't you realize that they sometimes place sell orders in a stock in a mannner designed to make the stock go down. Why do you think that even NASDAQ finally instituted a prohibition against selling short on a downtick? Short positions are marked to market based on the closing price Thursday afternoon and then accounts are settled on Friday. Shorts would like to see a low close on Thursday afternoon. Look at trading activity in Wand in the last half hour last Thursday. Was it a coincidence the stock collapsed at the end of the session? I do't know, but I wonder about it.
Who do you supposed leaked the information to the Bloomberg reporter about the departure of Wand's accounting officer when the company had not made and had not planned to make, rightly or wrongly, an announcement regarding it? Shorts like to leak their negative views or feed tidbits of information to reporters and columnists hoping to get a company get some bad press. The press usually knows they are being used, but it helps sell newspapers. Shorts get negative research reports written and disseminated around the Street. There have been instances when I have been contacted by a short interest trying to get me to sell my stock in a company. Other friends of mine have had the same experience. They have been known to interfere in a company's business by calling suppliers and customers, sometimes interefering with critically needed new financing. They highlight negatives, they distort information, they provoke controversy ( Something some portfolio managers can't bother putting up with), they hope to raise concerns, cause confusion in the minds of shareholders, destroy confidence, and distract managements away from their business. You know what? It works! You know Wand, and you would not be separated from your stock? But how about the less sophisticated and less knowledgeable shareholders? The ones that don't have the access, or can take the time or trouble to investigate? What about them?
Shorts love to operate on these threads, almost always under screen names. Sometimes the same person is operating under various screen names. Let's look at this GAD 4, for example. In his last message, he would have us infer that he is not short Wand stock, has no outside motive, wouldn't care if Wand sold at $20 because it doesn't matter to him, and that he only came to this forum because it was interesting.
Yet he arrives here for the first time on March 30th, coincidental also with his first appearance on the AOL thread. In only two weeks, he posts 12 messages here and 11 messages there. Everyone of them is negative. For a person who would have you believe he is here only because he found it interesting, he has talked to distributors, dentists, listened to conference calls, questions the company's numbers, followed events in Europe, etc., etc., etc. Read his posts in their entirety and you get the picture. You may know propoganda when you see it, but the poor less informed investor doesn't, and he is the one who pays the price, because not knowing who or what to believe' he panics when he sees the price dropping and sells his stock. You may have the luxury of seeing the price of Wand's stock go down
without caring, others don't.
If GAD 4 is ill today, it's probably because Wand stock went up 2 points today. If he is leaving this thread, it's probably because he got smart and covered his short position.
I bought over 1 million shares of Wand stock in the last week. I have loaned my stock out to the shorts and don't intend to squeeze them by calling it in. I would rather just collect the income I receive from lending them the stock and thus receive a dividend that the company itself doesn't pay me. Short squeezes rarely work and in the long run does nobody any good.
I, and my associates, have talked to many people in the past week, including distributors, dentists, physicians, management, Wall Street
money managers and analysts, other stockholders and brokers.
Not withstanding the fact that I have been wrong any number of times over the past 40 odd years that I have been investing professionally, and sometimes, to my chagrin, have been wrong when shorts have been right, the investment I have made in Wand stock for our Fund, our clients, and myself, speaks for itself. |
