Calling Out Mark Cuban

I've been meaning to blog about Mark Cuban for awhile, but finally got around to it tonight. Let me start off by saying that I respect Mark Cuban- he's a smart businessman who's done a hellava job turning arround the Dallas Mavericks. (Ed's Note: For the sake of sparing my readers, I'm not going to rehash Mark Cuban's life story here, but if you want to research it, click here).

For those of you who don't know, Mark runs his mouth and his blog at blogmaverick.com . Graphically, it's not a very pretty site to look at, but that's not the point. The point of that blog (as well as this blog for that matter) is for Mark to run his mouth about anything and everything he wants to talk about. At face value, I don't have a problem with that, as I do the same thing. But Mark goes out of his way to take cheap shots at the leaders of specific companies, specifically, CEO Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com.

Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics of why he argues the way he does against Byrne, however, I will say that when it's Mark Cuban who's writing analysis on why or why not people should buy a specific stock, or if they should short a specific stock, and it's Mark Cuban the billionaire who not only influences the markets when he moves money but he also influences the money moving decisions of hundreds, if not thousands of loyal fans and blog readers.

Mark is fairly blunt about that he's short 20,000 shares of OSTK. He goes out of his way to place Overstock.com and Patrick Byrne in an unfriendly light. However, when he mentions that several times over the course of a few months about how many shares he's short and why people shouldn't invest in Overstock.com and considering the clout that he obviously has over his fans and the investing community at large, should this be an violation of SEC rules?

Some of Mark's thoughts are rational, however most of them are only spilled on his blog to serve some self-serving interest that he has (such as his rants about HDTV, his movie theaters, his movie production company, etc).

Mark's only opinion is that his opinion is right and he is never wrong (trust me, I know first-hand after trading emails with him a couple of times). Part of what's good and decent about anyone is the ability to recognize when they are wrong. Unfortunately for Mark, he has NEVER been able to do this.