Hardly looks like it could come from someone who rifled through a hundred million dollars worth of shareholder equity in just one year, does it?

I get the feeling that Mark has never really been an investor. Yes, he did some day-trading back when that sort of thing was more popular, but day-trading isn't investing.

Mark has the emotional make-up of someone who can't accept their own culpability for their failures. I draw that conclusion from his interview on Merklinger's show where he attributed his day-trading losses to stocks that didn't do what the "charts" said they should.

In other words, it couldn't possibly have been his fault for being stupid enough to try his hand at day-trading in the first place.

Faulk seems bewildered by financials. He has taken up with a number of people whose involvements in pump'n'dump scams would have been obvious if he had just glanced at the financials of the companies they ruined. He embraced Rod Young from Eagletech, an obvious pump'n'dump', played footsie with Altomare, and befriended an old Stratton Oakmont rep who seems to have played a role in a number of other pump'n'dump scams.

When you begin with the kind of temperament that can't accept personal responsibility for investing mistakes, it is inevitable that you'll see our financial markets as a "cesspool" and those successful investors who do know how to invest prudently as "crooks". Unfortunately, there are too many other investors who are similarly incapable of accepting responsibility for their own mistakes. Faulk has successfully exploited this group of people to advance his own racket.

Another day of Novastar shareholders getting pounded... Overstock's bogus lawsuit getting no respect... No electricity, telephone service, or running toilets at the Pegasus Wireless plant.

Just another boring day in "naked short seller" scamville.

I do believe he calls himself the "president" of "TOGI Entertainment". However, in their junk advertising, I thought they aligned themselves as a subsidiary of "The Owners Group, Inc.", of which John Martin is the "CEO".

Not that it matters. The whole enterprise is a rat's nest.

Yeah, and I'm sure they've raked in some cash with their pump'n'dump touts of Diamond I and American Security Resources.

That doesn't mean you'd want to be an outside shareholder of that outfit.

And here I thought you'd been around the block a time or two.

Many of these disasters are brought public, not to raise capital, but to enable insiders to unload worthless shares upon gullible, stupid investors. (CMKM Diamonds started in this direction but no one knew how outlandish this dump was going to be.)

Look at how the reverse merger process typically works, ric. Someone brings a private company to an empty public shell. They take control of the shell for a token investment of, say, $100,000. The shareholders of the private company gets 85 to 90 percent of the shares of the new entity that emerges from the reverse merger. Those shareholders then dump their shares upon a new set of gullible, stupid investors. The enterprise spirals into the ground until the time comes where the shell is sold to the next private company looking to bend over and rape a new set of investors. The cycle simply repeats itself.

Faulk has already gone on record with the Oklahoma state legislature as being prepared to go public. How does a worthless enterprise like TOGI go public?

How do you think?

I have no problem investing in high-risk ventures or taking high-risk positions in a portfolio. However, there is a difference between "high-risk" and absurd.

Buying stock in a company with $89k worth of total assets and $2.4 million worth of debt isn't "high-risk".

It's just "STUPID".

All current, so far. Checking out the 1Q2007 10-Q for American Energy Production, Inc.

Funniest line item so far?

Over $300k dumped into "website" development during their start-up.

Gotta love it.

Yikes! No shortage of garbage at that site either.

As I recall, their so-called reports consisted primarily of "seals of approval". What is that if not a stock promotion?

Anyone who looked at the trash they were touting would immediately know that they deserved no one's seal of approval.

Pay close attention.

Those goofballs in Texas (and Oklahoma) just might try to stage their very own pump'n'dump scam.

I remain amazed by the gulliblers who are still convinced that "naked short selling" has ever been a real problem for ANY company.

Until you learn to decipher a 10-K/10-Q, you'll win nothing but more tax losses.

No one is discussing theft, McFly. If anything, the idea that you should be rewarded for inept investing comes closer to theft than anything else.

I don't know why reverse splits aggravate you. They're corporate non-events.

I see no reason why a company that fails to meet a 10-K or 10-Q filing deadline shouldn't have their stock halted... with trading to resume ONLY after the filings have been brought current.

However, I wouldn't count on a transfer agent's report to give you a meaningful look into the dilution taking place with a company's shares. It wouldn't account for warrants nor would it track the options being dole out to management or other insiders.

Wait... lemme guess...

You want a "fair" system that rewards investors for blindly putting their money into non-reporting, publicly-traded companies.

How about learning to read a 10-K, McFly?

I strongly disagree.

We need a venue for small start-ups and other micro-caps. Yes, the business failure rates are high and, yes, the fraud rates are high, too. However, in so many cases, those fraud rates wouldn't be so damned high if investors would just take the time and effort to do some simple due diligence before they threw their money into these wrecks.

There's no reason why highly speculative ventures should be penalized just because there are so many financially illiterate investors who've had their money taken away from them. Small businesses, being small businesses, suffer disproportionately high rates of business failure. When they do succeed, though, they usually pay off in a VERY big way. It's the nature of the beast, this extreme risk/reward ratio, and that's never going to change. It doesn't mean that we should stop forming new, small businesses.

The problem is that there are too many gulliblers out there who can be persuaded that every Rod Young, Gary Valinoti, Urban Casavant, Patrick Byrne, or Richard Altomare who walks down the Street is letting them in on the next Microsoft. Investors who don't know shit from Shinola will always get their clocks cleaned, whether or not we have pinksheets.

Pretty funny when the scammers start eating their young.

Were they held within self-directed IRA accounts?

He has his moments. And in all fairness to Mark, he's been involved in some very decent projects in the past.

It's just that when it comes to investing, he's got shitferbrains.

Oh, we're just too "intolerant".

Great article about de Guzman...

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012786


I just got off the phone with Eddie, though. He said they're probably going to stick with David Lee Roth... of course, that's not in stone.

You know, they never did get a positive ID on de Guzman after his little helicopter episode.

Plus, one of his wives supposedly got a Brazilian money order from him back in 2005.

Also, I hear there are rumors that he might be touring with Van Halen.

That's some killer peyote you found.

I don't think that the conditions that you and I discussed back in April were overly restrictive.

jimmyb1967 <jimmyb1967@hotmail.com> wrote:

[nufced],

Saw your reply. So if you want to mediate, how about this:

Tell him I'll do a 30 minute show with him in late June or earlyJuly entitled, "Does Naked Short Selling Hurt a Company?"

Have him select any company he wants for us to profile that is compliant with their filings. (I'm even agreeable to doing Eagletech if he wants, even though they fell out of compliance years ago.) Letting him choose the company is only fair. That shouldn't be so hard, should it? Afterall, he insists there are thousands of them.

Trust me. He will NEVER go for it.


Jim


But if he'd like to deviate from this format, I can be flexible. However, with his track record, I am simply not willing to join him for an ill-informed, free-for-all gripefest against hedge funds.

It's some of the same old crap he's been spouting since Day 1.

http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/-EditorsCorner/1056.html

I can accept the possibility that Mark might change. I truly believe that there is buried somewhere deep inside him a desire to help other people.

In fact, I would not have wasted as much time hanging around his guestbook if I was convinced that he was corrupt to the core.

I read his USXP piece on his website. Unless he's done a 180, I doubt I would have found his segment from today very interesting.

Not really.

Mark and I go way back. Years, really. I believe you can still find some of our old banter on his guestbook, if you go back far enough. He couldn't deal with the material I was digging up when he migrated to his ez-community, so all of those posts were deleted.

From what I've been able to piece together from his writings and interviews he's given, Mark got hammered trying to day-trade an account back when that sort of thing first became fashionable. When he got his head handed to him, he couldn't accept the possibility that his losses were attributable to his own stupidity. SOMEONE (besides him) had to be responsible.

So he fell for the "naked short seller" bogey-man. And it's been downhill ever since.

Initially, his foray into the scam was innocent enough, though obviously misguided. He regurgitated the material that was fed to him by the likes of David Patch and a number of other scammers who ripped off investors using the "naked short seller" playbook.

The turning point was his writing about Global Links, another massive rip-off that used the "naked short seller" scam as a cover. He knew, or should have known, that Global Links was a pump'n'dump scam, as I provided him with direct links to the SEC material which showed what they were doing.

I can have a lot sympathy for people who unknowingly make mistakes. Armed with the knowledge I provided him, Mark had to have known better. But aiding and abetting the Global Links scam served his agenda; truth be damned.

Still think it's my loss? Did you see the Altomare/Universal Express piece on his website?

So long as Mark continues to embrace crooks, I lose nothing by ignoring his bogus radio show.

Nope. I've listened to enough of Mark's schlock. In three years, his song almost never changes.

...except now it seems to slowly be occurring to him that Casavant MIGHT have had something to do with the destruction of CMKM Diamonds. Of course, Mark wants to hear Casavant's side of the story first...

No kidding, nuf.

Shame it's taken so many people too long to figure that out.

Stoecklein's got your Entourage certificate?


That is PRICELESS!

Yeah, I remember and remarked upon that to a number of associates at the time. The enterprise valuation for Jag Media is equally ridiculous, though their shares seem to be coming back down to earth.

Jag Media gets extra credit for ensnaring David Patch. While CMKM Diamonds has plenty of odd personalities associated with it, few of them bring the complete whackjob credentials to the table that Patch has.

Yeah. That really did take the cake. Butthead might have won on raw performance alone, but the style points really do put Casavant over the top.

No, Butthead Burrell was actually trying to shoot for an AmEx listing, so he did a massive reverse split to help inflate the share price.

Still, from peak to trough, over $400 million of market cap evaporated... in a very short period of time. Uncle Urban's performance, in comparison, was definitely bush-league.

Jag Media might give them a run for their money.

And while Bud Burrell's train ran off the tracks without attracting the same amount of attention CMKM Diamonds got, the capital destroyed by his outfit was much greater.

I'm surprised Fizzle didn't try to shake him down for another $25 before he blocked "imsoweary"'s email address.

Oh, don't tell me you're going to buy a copy of the book from the Oaf of Oklahoma?

I'm surprised you would say that.

There's nothing complicated about the CMKM Diamonds story. Casavant and friends got a hold of an old shell, fired up the share printing presses, and told any and every lie they could think of to get gulliblers to buy their shares. If they hadn't so successfully latched onto the "naked short seller" scam, it would've been something else.

The story itself is not particularly fascinating nor is it terribly complex, despite what the Faulking Idiot would have you believe. What's fascinating is the number of people who fell for it and the morons who continue to believe there's still a pot at the end of this rainbow.

Bre-X did manage to scam a number of reputable institutions. At the end of 1996, nearly 27 million Bre-X shares (~1/4 of their issue) was held by institutions.

No one with a brain in their head fell for the CMKM Diamonds gag.